


I Don't Always Know How I Feel (But I DO Always Notice How Great You Are)

by Aaron_The_8th_Demon



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Albert saves the day a lot, Alternate Universe - Hockey, Autistic Cooper, Bisexual Male Character, Explicit Sexual Content, Friends to Lovers, Gay Male Character, Harry is dense and doesn't understand that he actually does have Feelings about things, Light Angst, Like the angst is at manageable levels, M/M, Major Character Injury, Slow Burn, Surprisingly not that much angst for once, Team as Family, That NEVER happens in my fics, Typical Hockey Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-14
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:15:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 51
Words: 71,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24534433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aaron_The_8th_Demon/pseuds/Aaron_The_8th_Demon
Summary: “Albert, I would like to see you not be traded three times in as many years. Please make an attempt to dial down your unpleasantness.”“No promises, Coop. I have a job to do and I do it. Everything else can jump right the fuck off a cliff, especially now I’m in this rainy hell-hole in the wrong conference.”“Eventually you’ll make every team so miserable that your contract will never be taken and you’ll be out of the NHL entirely,” Cooper scolds. “Is that the result you’re looking to achieve?”A brief pause. “Not particularly.”“I didn’t think so. This is a good team, Albert, which I’ll likely be staying on. I want you to stay on it with me.”Harry smiles to himself at their conversation. Cooper wasdefinitelya good choice for this trade.
Relationships: Dale Cooper/Harry Truman, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 180
Kudos: 53





	1. Last Minute

**Author's Note:**

> Hi yes this is the most self-indulgent bullshit fic I've written in _years_ and stems almost entirely from the fact that I fucking miss playing hockey so much, I used to do it every week before the damn plague hit. So then my brain was like what if? Harry and Cooper? Except they're hockey players??? And it turned out WAAAAAAYYYYYYYY longer than I was expecting.
> 
> Things to know going in:  
> 1\. For those of you who picked up this fic not knowing anything about sports, I will be providing a list of hockey terminology at the end of each chapter (as applicable) for your convenience ^_^  
> 2\. I took away the bulk of Cooper's psychic powers in this fic because it actually makes it more interesting this way, now there's nothing to compensate for his autism and for me as an autistic writer that's just great to work with tbh.  
> 3\. This fic could alternatively be titled "Harry is too smart to be this fucking dumb." Poor dense bastard.  
> 4\. This fic rips on the Bruins a lot... they're actually my main NHL team.  
> 5\. This was written before Seattle's expansion team has been finalized or even officially named, one of the names that may be chosen is Kraken so I went with that because come on, that's just awesome.  
> 6\. So... I actually couldn't make this work in the time period of the show because the rules of professional hockey have changed so much since then. Because of this, you will see cell phones and iPads, and I replaced Cooper's tape recorder with a laptop that he's constantly using to email Diane with :D  
> 7\. To make it reasonable that these characters would be in the NHL together, some of their ages have been slightly altered. At the beginning of the fic, Harry is 33 instead of 43 and Cooper is 27. Bobby and Mike are both 20.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! The first chapter of this fic is going up WAY early. The reason being, I had another fic which got finished first, so once [No Reason To Hide From Me](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23909767) is fully posted, the other fic has been bumped up in the queue - this fic, the hockey fic, is not done being written yet but I don't want it to expire in my drafts bin and have to re-edit OVER THIRTY CHAPTERS OF STUFF. So, maybe this is like if you got an advanced screening of a tv show pilot? It will get posted, it just won't be for a couple more weeks. Thank you for your understanding and patience!

Harry’s least favorite thing is last-minute trades.

The season’s starting in two days and now he has new teammates who he’s probably never met outside the arena, and who he’ll have to talk into embracing the team’s culture without knowing them personally and without them knowing _him_ personally, either. Sometimes being team captain can be a massive burden… this is one of those times.

He reads the email from management. Two guys, a goalie and a right wing. He knows this goalie a little bit, actually, this was a guy he previously dreaded playing against, who averaged .989% last season and was absolutely surgical at stopping pucks in the net: Albert Rosenfield. Rosenfield for some reason had gotten tossed around a little, being on the Flyers for awhile and then last season on the Capitals. Apparently the Caps don’t want him anymore, so now the Kraken have him. As much as Harry hates these kinds of trades, he knows this one is desperately needed after their starting goalie got in a car accident of all things and broke both his legs last month.

The forward is Dale Cooper, also originally from the Flyers with the difference being he’s _always_ been a Flyer until now. Harry knows that Cooper has a lot of penalty minutes for fighting (not that he has any room to talk) and also that he can pretty much dance in circles around people and never be touched once. He’s got a rating of +17 and last season had 112 points. Cooper has even been called up for Team USA in the Olympics twice and is regularly chosen for the ASG. So, probably a good addition as well despite the PIM.

“Welcome to the team, guys,” Harry mutters, closing the email and then his laptop.

Harry goes into his kitchen and throws together a sandwich. He’ll see them at practice tomorrow and talk to both of them afterwards, hopefully the PR stuff won’t take too long and he’ll have plenty of time to do that. As he eats he has a sneaking suspicion this new guy will be put on his wing after Hank got traded to the Caps in exchange for this goalie. It doesn’t bother him much, though, because Hank was starting to get more and more problematic and Harry’s glad he’s gone someplace else. Three suspensions and six fines last season, not to mention leading the team in penalty minutes… it’s bad for their culture as a whole, it’s bad press, it makes Harry look bad for not being able to control a player on his line.

His phone buzzes in his pocket and he pulls it out.

“Hey, Frank.”

“How’s it going? I heard you lost a winger.”

“It was just Hank, Hawk’s still on my line. He’s got another three years before his contract needs to be renegotiated so he’s not going anywhere.” Harry takes a bite of sandwich and practically swallows it whole. “How’s Tampa?”

“Hot. I have PR bullshit tonight.”

“Yeah, sounds about right… hey since you’re in that conference, can you tell me about my two new guys a little?”

“I can try, who’d you get stuck with?”

“Albert Rosenfield and Dale Cooper.”

“Oof. Alright, Rosenfield is a prick and his teammates all hate him no matter where he goes, or so I’ve heard. That’s why nobody wants to keep him. He’s amazing at his job but you’ll have a hard time getting him in line. Your work’s cut out for you.”

“And Cooper?”

“Great player, fights a lot. Besides that who knows, I’ve never met him except on the ice. I know the Bruins really wanted him.”

“Great,” Harry grumbles sarcastically before cramming the rest of his sandwich into his mouth.

“Now you listen, Har. Whenever you’re shipped down to my neck of the woods…”

“Yeah?”

“I’ll try to not kick your ass so hard this year,” Frank teases.

“You’re a bastard. I still can’t believe you actually picked a god damn fight with me in our last match.”

“You had it coming, your winger was mouthing off.”

“Then why didn’t you fight _him?_ ” Harry laughs.

“It gave the papers something to go nuts over. How often you see two team captains who are also brothers fighting each other? It never happens. The sports correspondents had a field day.”

“If you get me tossed in the box again this year I’m gonna poison your food at Christmas.”

“Sure you will,” Frank says dismissively.

“I’m glad we got rid of Hank.”

“Yeah, he was a shit.”

“At least now he’s on a team that’s actually known for its head-hunting. That’s not something I want in my locker room.”

“Hopefully your new guys help you out some. Good luck this season, Har. If you don’t make it to the second round of playoffs this year I’ll have to kick your ass.”

“You know that wasn’t my fault,” Harry argues. “Half my guys were already injured. _I_ was injured. We weren’t making it past April.”

“Yeah.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hockey terminology:
> 
> Arena - The ice rink, the stadium. Where the team plays. There are also practice arenas where the team goes to work on stuff in-between games.
> 
> ASG - Short for All-Star Game.
> 
> Conference - A "grouping" of teams in the NHL. There are two conferences, the Eastern Conference and the Western Conference. This is mostly irrelevant except during the All-Star Competition and the Stanley Cup Playoffs, though in general WC teams will play other WC teams more often and EC teams will play other EC teams more often.
> 
> Forward - An umbrella term which encompasses centers and wings. Forwards are responsible for offensive play and scoring goals. The opposite of a defenseman.
> 
> Penalty minutes/PIM - Time spent in the penalty box for infractions during gameplay.
> 
> PR - Short for public relations.
> 
> Right wing - Forward position. At the center line, this player stands to the right of the center player. Also called "winger" for short.
> 
> Team culture - The general disposition of the players combined into a unit. Each team has a fairly unique culture in their locker room, which often depends a lot on the personality of the team captain and/or the head coach. Whoever is the de facto leader will foster this culture, which decides how the team behaves on pretty much every issue ranging from locker room pranks to in-game fighting to the emphasis on either offensive or defensive play as their main strategy.


	2. Choices, Choices

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay so like... at the time of posting this chapter, I'm in the middle of _chapter thirty-fucking-nine_ , so a change in policy is being implemented. I will start posting chapters of this fic on Saturdays. This way, it won't interfere with the Monday/Friday schedule of those other two fics, and also because this one is just turning out so damn long that it'll take fucking forever to have it all put up once it's completed.
> 
> What this means is, updates are currently being posted around midnight on Saturdays sometime between UTC+0 and UTC-4, and once the other two fics have finished going up then the schedule for this one will change and take over the Monday/Friday twice per week format.

Harry expects to be the first guy in the locker room. He always comes in early, even for practices, so he can psych himself up and get ready for whatever the day brings. His sticks rattle on his shoulder a little as he walks, the only real noise in the hallway, and almost distract him from noticing that the door is already closed. That’s unusual.

Nudging it open, he finds one of his new guys already sitting on the bench.

“Morning,” Harry says awkwardly. “Uh. You’re early.”

“Yes, I know,” Cooper smiles. “I was relentlessly teased for it on my previous team.”

“Yeah.” Harry goes to his stall and drops his stuff. “So my bet’s they’re putting you on my wing.”

“It seems probable,” he agrees. “Incidentally, I’ve heard nothing but good things about you as a leader and as a person. I believe we’ll have no problems with each other.”

“Oh. Well. Good,” Harry nods, digging around for his stick tape. “You uh, wore an A on the Flyers, right?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Listen, I know you’re not a rookie but I always say this to new faces on the team: anything’s wrong, you come to me first. I’ll do my damnedest to help you fix it, whatever it is. Problem with a teammate, girlfriend dumped you, any of that kinda stuff that gives you issues emotionally, you come talk to me about it.”

“Noted,” Cooper says agreeably, also taping his stick like Harry’s doing. “What can I expect as a member of this team?”

“Well, we try to be real tight with each other. Everyone in this locker room is family, the only guys you’ll ever be closer with are your actual brothers and sisters back home. Probably what’ll happen on your first few away games, the guys are gonna drag you around all over the place and show you every damn spot they like to eat in that city,” Harry smiles. “You’ll never go hungry while we’re out and about, that’s for sure. But be warned, they’re also gonna do everything in their power to find the most embarrassing moment in your career, and you’ll never hear the end of it. Eventually you’ll figure out it’s kind of a badge of honor almost, we’ve had competitions before trying to figure out whose is the worst and those can be kinda fun.”

“Who usually wins?”

“Me,” Harry admits. “My rookie year, I was drafted by Columbus and one’a my earliest games called up by them I stepped on the puck and hit my head on a teammate’s head… and we both ended up with concussions. And nobody ever lets me forget it.”

Cooper laughs. “Alright, well, this was also my rookie year. I was suspended five games for punching a referee after he called an instigator penalty on me for a fight that I most certainly didn’t start.”

“Ouch.” Harry shakes his head and grins. “Sounds like you’ll do just fine here.”

“Thanks, Harry. I appreciate the vote of confidence.”

“Y’know, you don’t talk like most hockey players I know,” Harry comments idly.

“Yes, I have autism.”

“Ah. Anything I should be worried about?”

“I don’t like things touching my neck.”

“I can live with that,” Harry says. As problems go, that’s a small one.

“I also have personal issues with a player on another team.”

“Well, there’s not much I can do about that.”

“Yes, I know. But he’s responsible for a severe upper body injury which kept me out of play for the second half of my sophomore season. Whenever we play Colorado you may reasonably expect a minimum of four fighting majors from me assuming Earle is on the ice that night.”

“That might be an issue,” he says. “Is there anything you can do to try and avoid that? I’ve read your stats, Cooper, you’re real good and I’ll need you on the ice and not in the sin-bin.”

“You could attack him on my behalf,” Cooper answers bitterly. “Short of that, conflict is essentially unavoidable.”

Harry mulls this over for a couple minutes and then more guys start showing up. Two pairs of D-men, Ed and Andy and then Bobby and Mike. Those two are younger than most of the team and they’re shits, but they’re really good and usually Harry can keep them from causing too much trouble. Harry’s starting to dress now so he stops paying attention to the door bumping open and closed again. Solid-color socks and a practice jersey. He rolls up his sleeves onto his elbow pads and by chance notices Cooper doing the same thing. The difference is Cooper attaching the Velcro fight-strap to the back of his pants so his jersey won’t ride up, something Harry’s never bothered with. Cooper’s gloves are still the black ones from being a Flyer instead of the dark blue everyone else has - he’s probably already called CCM and requested new ones, but Harry will ask him about it later on just to make sure.

Wearing everything but his helmet, gloves, and mouthguard, Harry gets up off the bench and stands in the middle of the room so everyone can see him. He clears his throat.

“Morning, guys. You probably already know this, but we got two last-minute trades in. I looked at their stats, they’re both real talented and we’re gonna make sure there’s room for them on the bench, right?” He gets a collective murmur of agreement. “You’re all good at this by now, make sure you find something in common with them and get some’a that great chemistry growing. Now last year we got our asses handed to us in the first round by Vegas, I wanna make damn sure that doesn’t happen again. So let’s put on our best tomorrow night for Los Angeles, get a good strong opening to the season and get some momentum going. We’re not gonna get all eighty two games, so let’s not go around tricking ourselves about that, but we could sure as hell go 75-5-2 if we want. Coach’ll be here soon, he’ll talk your ears off about it once he does, so for now I just wanna say we’ve got a great bunch’a guys this season. Let’s take advantage of that. I know none of us are happy about what happened with Pete, he’s not coming back to the NHL at all, so we’ve got Albert Rosenfield now. You’ve all seen him in action, he’s a brick wall and a nightmare for the other team. We also traded Hank at the last minute, so now my right wing will be Dale Cooper. He’d be a perfect hockey player and maybe the next Wayne Gretzky if he didn’t throw hands so much.” A chuckle goes around the room and Cooper grins in response. “Alright, guys, my only last thing is to say like always that you gotta wait until after practice to start figuring out what their ‘incident’ is. Once we’re back here in our stalls, you can start with that shit, not before. That’s it.”

The regular chatter starts up again as he sits, and Harry takes a glance around the room. Rosenfield looks a bit cranky, which he makes a note of so he can talk to his new goalie after practice. Ed still has the A of course. Until now he was Harry’s only alt-captain, but there’s one on Cooper’s chest, too. That could be interesting.

And their coach shows up. Gordon’s lost one of his hearing aids, so he’s shouting at the top of his lungs which has everyone else desperately covering their ears in the echoey locker room. After that they’re on the ice. Harry relishes the sensation, his freshly sharpened skates cutting the brand-new surface for the first time. It’s never stopped feeling like coming home for him and he grins around his mouthguard even while getting on his knees for his stretching routine.

Gordon’s yelling isn’t nearly as bad out here in the practice arena as he runs them through drills, and then the scrimmage comes. Harry beats back one of his own teammates to get the puck and whips it over to Hawk like he always does because Hank was usually more interested in getting into a brawl than actually catching a pass. He tucks it away into his mind for later: he’ll have to unlearn that habit. The puck is flung his way again and he makes an imperfect pass towards Cooper, who somehow still catches it like there’s magnets involved and immediately makes a beautifully precise shot from the blue line. Because of course he does. Harry’s seen him do this exact thing before from the receiving end - Cooper is incredibly talented. He’s not sure why the Flyers would ever want to give this guy up, but he’s already glad they did.

After practice they get another too-loud speech from Gordon in the middle of the ice and then everyone starts breaking up to go to the locker room. Harry ends up following after Cooper and Rosenfield, who until last season were teammates anyway.

“Albert, I would like to see you not be traded three times in as many years. Please make an attempt to dial down your unpleasantness.”

“No promises, Coop. I have a job to do and I do it. Everything else can jump right the fuck off a cliff, especially now I’m in this rainy hell-hole in the wrong conference.”

“Eventually you’ll make every team so miserable that your contract will never be taken and you’ll be out of the NHL entirely,” Cooper scolds. “Is that the result you’re looking to achieve?”

A brief pause. “Not particularly.”

“I didn’t think so. This is a good team, Albert, which I’ll likely be staying on. I want you to stay on it with me.”

Harry smiles to himself at their conversation. Cooper was _definitely_ a good choice for this trade.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hockey terminology:
> 
> A - Letters on a player's jersey. C is for captain, A is for assistant captain.
> 
> Alt-captain - Alternate captain, also called assistant captain. A team leader both on and off the ice, someone to take seriously, and who often helps mentor rookies and boost team morale when needed.
> 
> Blue line - Marks the boundary between the attacking/defensive zone and the neutral zone, so named because it's painted bright blue.
> 
> D-men - Short for defensemen. A defenseman's job is to prevent breakaways by the other team, to protect the goalie, and in general stop shots from being taken by opposing players.
> 
> Drills - Training exercises to improve on shooting the puck, blocking shots, and other various skills both relating to and independent of using the puck.
> 
> Fighting major - A five-minute penalty for fighting.
> 
> Fight-strap - A wide Velcro strap on the inside-bottom of a jersey which hooks to a loop on the back of the pants and keeps the jersey from riding up during play or from being pulled over your head during a fight.
> 
> Instigator penalty - Basically if you obviously are the one who starts a fight, they slap you with a bunch of extra time in the box. If you're REALLY misbehaving and get an instigating penalty in the final five minutes of regulation gameplay, it's an automatic one-game suspension and your coach also gets fined. So, we can see why Cooper was so upset about it.
> 
> Practice jersey - A boring, usually plain-colored jersey worn for practice so that the nicer, more expensive game-day jerseys don't get worn out as quickly.
> 
> Scrimmage - A mock-match between lines or special teams.
> 
> Sin-bin - Slang for penalty box.
> 
> Stall - On the bench, each player has their own space which has dividers to keep them separate. The stalls have hooks and shelves for holding equipment.
> 
> Stick tape - Cloth adhesive tape which is wrapped around the blade and hand-end of the stick. This helps the player hold onto their stick with their non-dominant hand, but also aids in gripping and directing the puck during play.
> 
> Throw hands - Slang for fighting, probably because the critical first step before a hockey fight is flinging away your gloves so that your fists are bare.
> 
> Upper body injury - Head, chest, arms. Usually in reference to an injury that takes a player out of the game, either for part of the match or for the entire remainder of it.


	3. Exceptional Players

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also since I forgot earlier - we are picturing Cooper at the age that KMac was when shooting _Blue Velvet_ but without the stupid haircut, and Harry looks like how Michael Ontkean looked in _Slap Shot_ except in modern hockey pads and obviously he doesn't end up doing a stripping routing while on the ice. (Yeah, I'm still not over seeing that.) Their haircuts are essentially identical to in the show, their faces are just younger. Also they're a bit more jacked than they are in the show because they're professional athletes after all, which can go for the rest of the characters as well.

The pregame speeches are all over. Everyone’s geared up, warmed up, taped up. The first line and the second D-pair are starting for the Kraken.

Harry’s focus narrows to two things: the white away jerseys of the Kings, and the puck, currently held by the linesman beside the center dot. Everything else will happen subconsciously. His hands itch under his gloves in anticipation of the start.

The puck drops and Harry loses the faceoff, and they chase it to their own blue line. In the left circle a shot gets taken but Bobby blocks it with his chest, and as it tumbles away from the scrum Hawk scoops it up. Harry tries to get into position but is knocked on his ass by a check, and even as he’s going down he sees Cooper catch the pass instead and barrel up the ice with it. Everyone chases after Cooper, now, Harry’s maybe ten feet behind his winger. A King catches up to Cooper but can’t quite steal the puck because Cooper gets tripped instead and the whistle goes. They’re twenty seconds in and have a power play already.

Back on the bench: “That was a good breakaway, Coop.”

“I wish I’d been faster,” he argues, shaking his head and wiping his face with a towel. “He caught me.”

“You drew a penalty,” Hawk points out. “It could’ve been worse.”

They all pick up bottles of orange Gatorade and squirt it into their mouths. Harry watches his teammates ping-ponging the puck around in the attacking zone, sometimes taking shots but then recovering again. Ed makes a great slapshot which gets covered up by the goaltender and lines change on both sides.

The only interesting thing that ends up happening during the 1st is an opponent catching the puck with his face and losing three teeth. They head back to their locker rooms for the intermission scoreless and Cooper is pulled aside by Lucy to be interviewed on their way in, so he’s a couple minutes late getting to his stall.

Harry’s brain turns back on again now he’s no longer on the ice. Stupidly, he actually kinda does want to see Cooper fight just for the spectacle of it, but they probably won’t get that tonight because the Kings aren’t really a fighting team as much as some others. If they’re looking for a knock-down, drag-out brawl, they’ll have to wait until they play the Bruins or the Caps, maybe the Blues. Or apparently the Avs, considering what Cooper said before practice yesterday.

Aside from the lack of fighting, Harry’s liked what he’s seen so far from his two new arrivals. Albert is a god in goalie pads, there might as well be cinderblocks walling off the front of the net for all the success the Kings have had so far. If he plays like this every game, which Harry knows for sure he will, then his sour and cynical attitude will be a lot easier to put up with as a trade-off. Cooper is equally amazing, if in different ways. He’s practically ballet-dancing in the arena, nobody can touch him except for that one trip at the beginning of the period. He reads the ice almost perfectly and is giving an amazing performance tonight; Harry’s been surprised at least five times already with passes from Cooper he didn’t even know he was open for.

On to the 2nd. The checking line is up first this time, shoving the Kings center off the puck and then carrying it in deep themselves only for it to go flying up out of play. Harry’s line is on again in the right circle, and he ends up slapping it backwards into Cooper’s skates. He barely even sees anything, just the puck whipping into the net beside the Kings’ goalie’s left ear, and then the horn blares. The first goal of the game and of the Kraken’s season was rung in by their new alt-captain, who’s right now screaming with both hands and his stick over his head in celebration. The four of them crash into Cooper and all slap his helmet before heading to the bench. All through the arena, the fans are on their feet yelling as the stadium announcer booms: Kraken goal by Number Fifty Nine Dale Cooper, assisted by Number Forty Six Harry Truman.

The team is even more energized after this. The Kings aren’t giving up or anything (not even close), but a goal in the beginning of the 2nd seems to be doubling the Kraken’s efforts. For at least seven minutes after that they’re perpetually in the attacking end of the ice, a mob of green jerseys stapling Kings players into corners and sideboards to win time for firing off shots. Harry’s about to throw himself over the bench wall to start his line’s next shift when the puck gets iced, so he climbs over more calmly instead to take his place on the left dot in the King’s defensive zone.

It drops. Harry wins it. He flings the puck to Mike, who passes to Cooper, who passes _back_ to Mike and then one of their five youngest players scores their second of the night. Kraken goal by Number Twenty Two Mike Nelson, assisted by Number Fifty Nine Dale Cooper and Number Forty Six Harry Truman.

Things get interesting after that. In the final five minutes of the 2nd, Andy gets boarded and even as the refs are whistling for a penalty Ed is picking a fight with the guy that did it (and of course loses - Ed’s never been much of a brawler). Penalties are handed out on both sides, but at least Andy seems to be okay, which is what’s really important. Everyone on the bench jokes that it’s because he’s too big and dumb to understand that he’s supposed to get hurt. Albert, on their end of the ice, looks bored as all hell even through all his body armor, and Harry can’t blame him one bit for that.

Heading for the locker room at the start of the second intermission, Mike is pulled away by Lucy to probably talk about his goal, and the team is subjected to Gordon’s way too loud “this is good, keep doing what you’ve been doing” speech.

“We made time for you to just sit back and be lazy, how’s it feel to just be over there taking a nap like that?” Bobby chirps.

“Fuck off,” is Albert’s flat, dismissive reply before taking a long gulp of water.

“Think we’ll actually get an answering goal coming up?” Hawk mutters, leaning over to Harry’s ear from his stall.

“Hopefully not, it’d be great if we can get our start with a shutout,” Harry whispers back before stuffing a towel through the neck of his jersey to wipe around his collarbone under his chest pad.

The 3rd starts with the last ten seconds of Ed’s fighting major, and after that it’s the first D-pair and the checking line throwing down mostly in the neutral zone. Harry’s line is up again and Cooper - of course Cooper - beats a King off the puck and pretty much flies away with it, whipping it into the net under the goalie’s elbow. He’s been on the ice for all of twelve seconds when he does this. Kraken goal by Number Fifty Nine Dale Cooper, unassisted.

“So how can we get a hat-trick out of you tonight?” Hawk asks on the bench.

“Well, it depends on the positioning of the puck in relation to not only me but-”

“Coop, I think that was rhetorical,” Harry laughs, slapping his shoulder.

The Kings have given up three goals now and are obviously getting frustrated. To their credit, the Kraken don’t get sloppy and careless, instead pressing on like they’ve been doing. What really seals the deal is when there’s nine minutes left in the 3rd - Kraken goal by Number Thirty Seven Tommy Hill, assisted by Number Fifty Nine Dale Cooper and Number Eleven Bobby Briggs. The Kings pretty much deflate after that and while Cooper doesn’t get a hat-trick, he does still have two goals and two assists to his name and Albert brings them into the new season with a 4-0 shutout.

The three stars of the game are called out - number three is actually Bobby, who’s been working like crazy to keep the puck in the attacking zone all night; number two is Albert for the shutout; and number one is, of course, Cooper, who outshone all of his teammates while also managing to help them pull together on the ice even though he’s so new. He deserves to be called the first star of the game.

Finally, Lucy pulls Harry aside to interview him.

“Harry, as team captain, what are some challenges you faced tonight despite your win?”

“Uh, kinda the usual stuff,” he admits. He can’t imagine how unattractive he looks right now on camera with his curls plastered down by sweat and his face probably still red. “Y’know, we have two last-minute trades, some young guys. We have three rookies right now and they’re still working things out for themselves. And our head coach lost one of his hearing aids, that didn’t help any,” Harry chuckles.

“Your two last-minute trades were two of the stars of the game tonight.”

“Yeah, Albert’s a brick wall, I’m glad the Caps sent him our way. Maybe we’ll get his attitude adjusted a little and he’ll stick around for awhile. I miss having Pete as our starter, but he’s not gonna be able to come back so really I don’t think I could’ve asked for a better replacement.”

“What about your top goal-scorer tonight? You’ve played against Cooper before, what’s it like having him now as a teammate and an assistant captain?”

“Oh, he’s amazing,” Harry says without even thinking about it. “Great attitude in the locker room, he’s so smart, all the guys already like him. Him and Rosenfield used to be two of my worst nightmares to play against, now they’re both on my side. It’s incredible. I think we’ve got a great team this year, some really good guys, we pulled in some new talent. I don’t wanna jinx us or anything, but if tonight’s any indication for the rest’a the season, I think we got a real good shot at the Cup this year.”

“Okay, thank you, Harry.”

The camera is turned off and Harry wipes his head with a towel. “You sorted things out with Andy yet?” he asks.

“No,” she mumbles. “I don’t mean to complain, but sometimes it feels like it’s more complicated than it needs to be and at the same time he’s not the smartest so it’s mostly just a mess right now and I decided I needed some me-time where we don’t see each other for a few weeks.”

“Okay, long as you have a plan… Lucy, I know he’s dumb, but he means well and he loves you. Maybe knowing that’ll help.”

“I know.” She gives him a discouraged nod. “Thank you.”

Harry finally makes it back to the locker room and finds the usual ruckus, guys throwing balls of sock tape at each other and generally goofing off. A glance into the showers gives him Bobby playing a prank on Mike: he’s standing outside the stall on a chair slowly pouring more and more shampoo down on Mike’s head, which will keep his buddy in there for way too long trying to get rid of the suds. Harry doesn’t mind that so much. Pranks are inevitable, but he’s got a really strict rule in place that if he catches anyone trying something that might actually get a teammate hurt he’ll immediately report them to Gordon and get them scratched from the next game.

They’re given the standard rundown of here’s what went well during this game (almost everything), here’s what went not-so-well during this game (almost nothing), here’s the time you need to be at the airport tomorrow to fly to Anaheim (8:30 in the morning). Their gear is all packed up and given to the equipment guys, and Harry stays behind for a few minutes in case anyone wants to talk to him. Nobody does, so he eventually gets up and leaves.

Which just makes it that much more surprising when Cooper ambushes him out by his truck.

“This was one of my best season-opening games yet,” comes a voice in the darkness of the parking garage.

Harry could swear he actually does jump right out of his skin. Once he’s back inside his skin again, all he can feel is his heartbeat jackhammering against his ribs, trying to escape.

“Jesus, Coop, don’t do that.”

“Sorry.”

“You need something?”

“I would like to speak with you on behalf of Albert.”

Well that’s… not what Harry was expecting at all. “Okay. What’s up?”

“He’s not a people-person.”

“Yeah, I gathered,” Harry says dryly.

“However, as you’ve noticed, he’s incredibly skilled at his profession. I would appreciate if you’d be able to look past his generally unpleasant demeanor whenever possible so long as he isn’t actively berating any teammates.”

“Okay, I’ll do my best. How about you, you doing okay with us so far?”

“I’m absolutely exceptional, Harry.”

 _You damn sure are exceptional,_ Harry thinks to himself as he nods. “Alright, then. Have a good night, Coop.”

“You as well.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hockey terminology:
> 
> Assist - Helping a teammate to score a goal. Each goal can have a maximum of two other players credited as assisting.
> 
> Attacking zone - The end of the ice that the opposing team's goalie is stationed in; the goal that you try to score on.
> 
> Boarded/boarding - Slamming an opposing player into the boards or glass, hard and on purpose. This is an infraction and gets you boxed.
> 
> Breakaway - When a player "breaks out" of the defensive zone and goes charging up the ice in the hope of catching the opposing goalie off-guard and scoring while the goalie's D-men are still in the defensive or neutral zones.
> 
> Check - A blow landed on another player during gameplay. There are many different kinds of checks and not all of them are legal. The goal of checking an opponent is to get them away from the puck (usually legal), or else to start a fight/hurt somebody (usually not legal).
> 
> Checking line - A line of three forward players whose main role is to be good defensively and sometimes inflict punishment to the opposition through bodychecking or just plain hard work to wear down the other team.
> 
> Chirp/chirping - Joking, ribbing, sometimes good-natured and sometimes mean-spirited. Usually directed at teammates, opposing players, and refs, only rarely at fans or off-ice staff.
> 
> Circle - A large circle at specific points on the ice with a faceoff dot. Faceoffs take place here after a play stoppage in either team's attacking zone, except after a goal is scored or an offside is called.
> 
> D-pair - Defensive pairing. D-men are ordered in pairs, a pair is sent in combination with a line (except when special teams or overtime are involved).
> 
> Drawing a penalty - When you get the other team to fuck up so one of their players is sent to the box. This may or may not be intentional, depending on the player and the circumstances.
> 
> Faceoff - Two centers at the dot, trying to beat each other to the puck when the referee drops it on the ice. Whoever gets the puck to his teammates first wins the faceoff.
> 
> Hat-trick - Scoring three goals in a single game. Generally speaking, a rarity for anyone except the most highly skilled and talented players.
> 
> Iced/icing - When a player hits the puck to their team's attacking zone so fast that one of their teammates can't reach it before an opposing player can; to qualify for icing, it must pass the goal line and be essentially behind the net (but obviously not in the net itself).
> 
> Intermission - A 20-minute space between periods for the players to rest and talk about strategy with the head coach before heading back out onto the ice.
> 
> Line - A trio of forwards, consisting of a left wing, a center, and a right wing. A line is sent in combination with a D-pair (except when special teams or overtime are involved).
> 
> Power play - Usually when one team takes a penalty, the other will go on the power play. This means they have a man-advantage because the team with the penalty can only have four skaters instead of five, as the penalized one is currently in the sin-bin for however many minutes. Power plays usually last for two minutes, but more rarely four or five minutes depending on the infraction. The team on the man advantage has a better chance to score in theory.
> 
> Scratched - When a player does not dress for a game, either due to injury, punishment, or personal reasons.
> 
> Scrum - A cluster of hockey players from both teams, dicking around on the ice and trying to get the puck away from each other. Checking and fighting may be involved.
> 
> Shift - The amount of time that a forward line or a D-pair is on the ice.
> 
> Shutout - Winning a game without letting the other team score a single goal.
> 
> Sideboards - The walls and glass panels surrounding the ice.
> 
> Slapshot - A hard shot made by raising the stick about waist-high before striking the puck with a sharp slapping motion. Fairly common to D-men.
> 
> Sock tape - Clear (or, rarely, black-ish) tape which is wound around the shins to keep the leg-socks in place.
> 
> Starter - Short for starting goaltender, the goalie who is in the net at the beginning of the game (regardless of whether he actually stays there) for the majority of games in a season. Some teams have a starter and a backup, and the starter takes about 75% of the games; other teams have two starter goalies, and the games are split about 50/50 between both of them.
> 
> Unassisted goal - Scoring without the help of any of your teammates.


	4. All Sorted Out

They end up on a six-game win-streak at the beginning of the season. Cooper keeps being amazing through these games and against the Golden Knights, who booted the Kraken out of the playoffs last season, he gets a hat-trick and three assists in a 7-2 win. Now’s their seventh game of the season and Harry’s a little worried - all winning streaks snap, eventually. Will theirs end tonight? Besides their very first game they’ve been on a road trip, so this is their thirteenth night away from home. That can wear on the guys sometimes and hype-speeches in the locker room really only go so far. On the other hand, though, extending their winning streak to seven games is a great motivator all by itself and it’s an incredible start to their season anyway.

And tonight, they’re playing the Canucks.

Harry has a little bit of personal beef with this team. There’s an alt-captain here who slew-footed him once and never got penalized for it, and he just _knows_ the refs were bribed because the Kraken also lost that game 5-3 with the Canucks scoring twice off of goaltender interference calls which weren’t actually called. Vancouver has lots of great places to eat, especially if you like Chinese food, but Harry never likes playing hockey here and that’s probably not gonna change.

First line, first D-pair. A bright blue jersey crouches across from him at the center dot, and when the puck drops it’s chaos like usual. Harry whacks the puck backward between his feet to Andy, who takes it almost to their own blue line before passing it to Hawk. Hawk’s about to get mobbed and so throws it across the neutral zone to Cooper, and then the puck is back to Harry again and he carries it into the attacking zone with two Canucks D-men chasing him. He sends the puck to Ed, who has an open line of sight and so takes a shot into the goalie’s leg pad - the rebound is just barely scooped up by Hawk and passed to Cooper before he gets checked. Cooper tries sending it to Harry and then Harry’s no longer aware of the puck because he’s very suddenly flying sideways into the boards. The whistle sounds but he’s dazed for a second while he sits up off the ice.

“ _Vancouver penalty number twenty seven, double minor, charging and boarding,_ ” comes the ref’s voice over the stadium speakers as Cooper pulls Harry to his feet. The crowd starts loudly booing the ref for this, like it’s his fault their team are assholes.

At least they’re on the power play for four minutes. Harry’s already back to normal by the time he reaches the bench and the check-in with the medical trainers is short. He watches their first power play unit take the ice.

“Are you alright, Harry?” Cooper asks beside him, sounding way too concerned.

“I’m fine, Coop. No permanent damage.”

“Your skates lost contact with the ice when he threw you.”

“Trust me, I’ve had way worse,” Harry smiles.

“Alright, if you’re sure.”

Shortly after they stop talking, they both watch in horror as a Canuck gets a breakaway and actually manages to land a shorthanded goal over Albert’s shoulder. The enemy goal horn blares - the Canucks have drawn first blood. There’s three minutes left in the power play, though, the Kraken can still salvage this situation… allegedly. Power plays tend to be one of their weak points as a team.

Harry and Cooper are back on the ice again for the center dot faceoff. He manages to win the puck by a fraction of a second and slaps it over to Cooper, who carries it into the attacking zone where it belongs. They end up ping-ponging it around a little, trying to catch their opponents in a bad spot, and thank god Cooper gets an answering goal to tie the score.

Not much else happens in the 1st. Mostly the puck is run back and forth up the ice like this in a tennis game, a couple icing calls happen but nothing ever comes of it. They head for their locker rooms still tied 1-1. Being an alt-captain, Cooper gets the chance to give the team’s intermission speech today - he’s already so embedded that it’s like he’s played for the Kraken for years, and Harry knows they’ll listen to him.

Albert, on the other hand…

“I think it would’ve been more productive if the defensemen had actually been concerned about defense and stopped that bastard from charging me.”

“Albert, I know you’re aware of the fact that breakaways occur with some frequency and there’s very little to be done about it, please don’t interrupt me,” Cooper demands.

Harry snorts quietly to himself at that as Cooper goes back to what he was saying. After that’s all done with, Cooper sits down in his stall and compulsively starts combing his hair even though his helmet’s gonna go back on and mess it up again in a few minutes. It’s kinda funny how he does that and Harry’s surprised nobody’s chirped him for it yet.

About halfway through the 2nd they manage to put in a second goal and get ahead, and following this Harry’s line is up again - everything’s fine until Harry gets speared by a Canuck. He collapses onto the ice in a pile and stays there, hands over his junk and groaning every swear word he knows until he runs out of breath. After that he just lies there for a minute, but it’s made a little more bearable by the fact that he’s got a great vantage point of what happens next: he finally gets to see Cooper fight.

The number on the jersey is 68 with RENAULT in white block letters over top, and then a pair of navy blue gloves are flying in opposite directions so that Cooper can grab onto the bastard’s jersey and start throwing punches. The fight’s not entirely one-sided, Renault hits Cooper a couple times in the head to knock away his helmet and then give him a black eye, but Cooper lands twice as many blows and eventually throws the other guy down to the ice. He keeps wailing on him, even, until the ref and both linesmen get close enough to pry them apart. Renault is yelling something in Quebecois that gets Cooper starting towards him again, only to be dragged away to the penalty box by the linesmen. Ed skates after them to give back Cooper’s helmet and then gets Harry over to the tunnel. He limps away from the arena with the medical trainers and after they check him out they decide to keep him off the ice for the rest of the period, which really bothers him. Yeah, he’s in pain (the worst kind of pain), but he’s also the captain and he should be out there leading his team. He’ll get reevaluated during the second intermission at least, so he’s probably not out for the whole game.

Harry waits in the locker room, still mostly-undressed as his team begins piling in for the second intermission. Bobby looks way too pleased with himself so he probably also got a fighting major, and Harry’s winger already has the start of an impressive black eye.

“That’s some shiner there, Coop.”

“I’m not unsatisfied with the outcome of that fight,” Cooper declares proudly as he sits and then wipes sweat off his face with a towel.

“You gonna live, Harry?” Hawk asks as he sits.

“They’re taking another look at the end of the intermission, hopefully I’ll be back for the second half of the 3rd.”

“That was so painful the whole team felt it,” Hawk snorts. “Not every day you get to see a fourth-line center get so arrogant he spears the other team’s captain in the dick.”

“Yeah, hopefully getting beat up by Coop will teach him not to do it again. What’s the score?”

“Still two-one, we kept them in their end for the rest of the period just outta spite,” he chuckles.

Harry grins and then looks past him to their liney in the corner. “Say, Coop, you didn’t get an instigator for that, did you?”

“Thankfully no, I didn’t. The officials were surprisingly understanding of my motivations for perpetrating violence against an opponent.”

“Y’know, cap, you guys should prob’ly be careful,” Bobby snickers, looking at Harry. “All the articles by those damn reporters are already saying you and Coop have an epic bromance like in a Seth Rogan movie, pretty soon Deadspin’s gonna start calling you gay.”

“They wouldn’t necessarily be wrong, I _am_ gay,” Cooper says calmly.

The entire locker room goes dead silent and everyone stares at him. Harry will be ashamed of this later, but he also joins in on the shocked gawking at his teammate. He should say something. He knows he should, but no words are coming to him right now. It’s just made worse by the fact that _Andy_ is the one who finally breaks the fugue.

“Is that why you got traded?”

Cooper frowns. “I requested the trade once my contract expired.”

Finally Harry finds his voice again. “Alright, guys, enough. You’ll have plenty of time to be homophobic bastards after we’re done winning this game,” he snaps, not able to keep all the bitterness out of his voice. He should say something, he knows he should do a better job of backing up his winger, but the team can’t handle any more surprises right now. _Coward,_ he thinks to himself. _You’re just afraid they’ll turn on you. God forbid you do the right thing when it counts._

After that debacle is put on the back burner, things progress mostly-normally and Harry even gets to play in the final ten minutes of the game. His presence doesn’t seem to make that much of a difference, but they win 2-1 and the streak continues. While they’re all shucking their gear afterwards, Harry can feel Albert glaring horribly at him for some damn reason but he does his best to ignore it. He turns in all his stuff to the equipment guys and on the bus heading for the hotel he thinks really hard about how he should go forward.

In his room, Harry changes into sweats and a flannel and immediately leaves again to head down the hall. He swallows before knocking on the door.

“Who is it?”

“It’s just me, Coop.”

The door opens a few seconds later. “Come on in, Harry.”

“How’s your eye?”

“Swollen. I’ve suffered worse injuries. I also suspect that’s not what you’re really concerned about.”

“Yeah…” Harry sits on the corner of the bed and watches his winger settle in the armchair. “I think maybe there was a better time and place for you to bring that up, Coop.”

“Are you upset with me?”

“No, of course not. I’m worried about… Coop, why did you get traded? Be honest with me. Did it have something to do with this?”

“It had everything to do with this. The reaction from the fans was perfectly accepting, and many of my teammates were unconcerned. However, management and the coaching staff took exception to the discovery that my sexual orientation wasn’t the same as theirs. My time on ice was drastically reduced and I was moved down to the fourth line… it was no longer an environment I could thrive in as a player.”

“That sucks, Coop, I’m sorry.”

Cooper nods. “I’ve heard good things about the Kraken long before I requested the trade. As I understand it, one of the assistant coaches has a sister who’s a lesbian and Gordon is friends with a trans woman. I had significantly less fear of a repeat incident with this team, at least until tonight.”

“Yeah… well look, I know you maybe have trouble once in awhile knowing when it’s a good situation to share something like that, and that’s not your fault. So just - going forward, don’t bring up big ‘controversial’ topics in the middle of a game, it’s just not a good idea. Because then if we lose the guys’ll blame you for distracting them no matter how stupid it is to say something like that. But I’m also gonna see about talking to them about this on the plane to Long Island tomorrow and see if I can get things under control for you.”

“Thanks, Harry.”

“You gonna be okay?”

“Yes, I’m alright. You should watch out for Albert, he’s very likely to give you a verbal thrashing on my behalf for not defending my honor in the locker room.”

Harry chuckles. “How are you friends with that cranky bastard? You’re total opposites.”

“I’ve been told many times that I’m simply too likeable for my own good.”

“Yeah, well, you are,” he snorts. “Most guys would still be adjusting a little bit, you’re already acting like you’ve been on the team as long as I have.” Harry shakes his head and gathers his courage. “For the record, you’re not the only one on the roster who’s not straight.”

“Harry, if anyone has given you this information in confidence, it isn’t your place to out them in order to comfort me,” Cooper scolds.

“Of course it’s not. I’m not outing any of my teammates.”

It takes a second for Cooper to get what he’s saying.

“Do they know?”

“Hawk does. I haven’t said anything to the rest of them yet… I’m just gutless like that, I guess. And they’ve seen me a couple times going on dates with women, so they’re probably gonna do the exact same thing as they did tonight if they ever found out I also go on dates with men sometimes.”

Cooper nods. “When’s Pride Night for us?”

“First game in January, we’re starting the new year with it. They’re giving us special warm-up jerseys for it and everything this season.”

“Given the information you’ve shared with me, I’d like for both of us to be very closely involved with that event if you’re not opposed to it. I believe it would be a less daunting task if both of us do it together.”

“I’ll think about it,” Harry promises. “I’ll have to come out to the rest of the team first.”

“Yes, I suppose you will.” Cooper glances at his watch. “Tomorrow comes early… thank you for speaking with me, Harry.”

“You’re welcome, Coop. I’ll get everything sorted out with the team tomorrow, I promise.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hockey terminology:
> 
> Cap - An endearment, short for captain. Bobby is (probably begrudgingly) showing respect for Harry's position by calling him that.
> 
> Deadspin - A despicable tabloid (redundant, I know!) which is obsessed with hockey scandals.
> 
> Goaltender interference - A punishable offense where a player or players deliberately act in a way that stops the opposing goalie from doing their job. Sometimes problematic and subjective to call for a referee.
> 
> Linesmen - Supplements the job of the referee, calls some infractions and penalties. Usually there are two of them on the ice alongside the ref.
> 
> Liney - Slang for line-mate, a forward who's usually on the same shift as you and often ends up being one of your best friends.
> 
> Quebecois - Canadian-French, not to be confused with French-French (as in, the French that's spoken in France and not Canada). However this can also refer to the people who live there; ancestrally, I'm Quebecois.
> 
> Shorthanded goal - Scoring a goal during the other team's power play, while your team is down a player.
> 
> Slew-foot - Sweeping or kicking out a player's skate or tripping them from behind, causing them to fall backwards. An infraction that gets you sent to the box and has a moderately high chance of injury for the victim.
> 
> Spearing - Jabbing an opponent with the end of the stick, usually with intent to injure. A double-minor penalty at minimum.


	5. Tabloids

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact: Bruins aside, the Islanders are my other NHL team.

Harry waits until the thing changes to let him know he can take his seatbelt off before he gets up and stands in the middle of the aisle. It doesn’t take long for all his teammates to be looking his way.

“I’m not gonna say I’m disappointed in you guys,” he starts. “Or at least I’m not gonna say that _yet._ I know that most of you are kinda startled by what Coop said yesterday in the locker room, but here’s the thing. That information is about as important to hockey as what kind of car he drives. I don’t really have a good reason to think any of you won’t be okay with this, but if you start acting funny towards him that’s when I’m gonna _start_ getting disappointed in a hurry. If anybody decides to start being a shit about this, there’s gonna be consequences and you _will_ get punished. I don’t care if I have to get Gordon to scratch half of you and fill the bench with AHL callups, there’s no room on this team for that bullshit and I’m not gonna put up with it even a little. Thank you.” And he goes back to his seat and sits down again.

The flight is pretty boring otherwise. When they get to New York, Harry and Cooper head out for a late dinner as soon as they’re checked into their hotel.

“You feel a little weird facing the Flyers in a few days?” Harry asks as they’re waiting for their orders.

“Slightly,” Dale nods before taking a sip of coffee. “I’ve been with them since I was drafted until this season.”

“I was in Columbus first… after a couple years they bounced me to Montreal, but I only stayed with them for one season before coming to Seattle. But it’s always a little weird the first time you’re traded.”

“Harry, to be perfectly honest I’m considerably more worried about our game in Boston between the matches against Long Island and Philadelphia.”

“You are? Why?”

“I’m not completely sure, it can be best put as a ‘gut feeling’ I’ve been experiencing.”

Harry frowns and nods a little - even though he was only a Hab for one season, he grew to really hate playing the Bruins and he can understand why it could make someone nervous. Original Six teams are always scary and even ignoring that the Bruins are really not a team you should be fucking with, especially with the roster they have right now. Last season, their final game before the playoffs was against the Bruins and the Kraken got viciously, irredeemably thrashed.

Their food finally arrives, which is two different kinds of pizza (because you can’t go to New York and not get pizza). Harry inhales three slices all at once while Cooper frowns thoughtfully across from him.

“It occurs to me that Bobby did make something of a point yesterday,” he says slowly.

“Huh?” Harry very articulately says in reply around a huge bite of his fourth slice. It takes less food to sustain a herd of elephants than it does one professional hockey player.

“Aren’t you concerned about negative press in tabloids? Deadspin have taken issue with me for some time now.”

“I banned everyone from reading that shit,” Harry says bluntly. “I don’t wanna hear anything about what Deadspin has to say _ever_ and it’s not good for team morale, so everyone knows to stay away from it.”

“I see. But they will slander you at some point for publicly associating with me so often.”

Harry’s actually really touched that Cooper cares so much about his reputation, something he himself could barely give a damn about most of the time. He eats most of the rest of his current slice before answering.

“Dale, you’re my teammate, you’re my assistant captain, you’re an amazing player and you’re my friend. So here’s how it is: I _do not_ give a flying fuck what Deadspin has to say about this. Same goes for any other bullshit tabloid who wants to throw their dumbass opinions into the mix. That’s really the long and short of it, so don’t worry about it, okay?”

Cooper chuckles. “Okay, Harry.” He also swallows a slice of his own pizza without stopping to chew it first. “I’ve never heard you swear so much at once before.”

“Yeah, well… I was tryna make a point. I save all the bad language for when I’m being extra serious,” Harry grins. “That’s how you know I mean it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hockey terminology:
> 
> AHL callup - A player pulled from the "farm team" to substitute an injured or otherwise scratched player on the NHL team. Not necessarily the same as a rookie.
> 
> Boston Bruins - The top team in the NHL at the time that the 2019-2020 season was interrupted by COVID-19. Fear The Bear, motherfucker!
> 
> Hab - Slang or shorthand for a player on the Montreal Canadiens.
> 
> Original Six team - A phrase used to identify the six teams generally thought to be the founding members of the National Hockey League. These are the Boston Bruins, the Montreal Canadiens, the Toronto Maple Leafs, the New York Rangers, the Detroit Red Wings, and the Chicago Blackhawks. These teams are considered to have a richer and deeper culture and generally a much larger and stronger fanbase than most other NHL franchises.


	6. Magic Pies

As it turns out, Dale was right: the Bruins are something to be worried about.

The Kraken keep their streak alive against the Isles with a 4-2 win, and they head for Boston with eight victories trailing along behind them. The Bruins and the Flyers are their final two games before heading back to Seattle for three games at home and the team is in good spirits.

And then they play in Boston.

The Kraken gets absolutely curb-stomped.

It’s an embarrassing 6-1 loss and one of the only games so far where Dale can’t score for them, in fact he can’t even bring in an assist. A big factor is a moose-sized defenseman who goes crashing into Albert in the first seven minutes of the game, concussing him and getting him banished to the quiet room. Left with their backup goalie, the Kraken try to salvage the situation but Andy gets a tripping call and then Mike gets a fighting major and the team’s defense collapses like a toddler stomping on a house of cards. The Bruins put in two goals in the 1st, three in the 2nd, and by the time goal six is sent whistling into the net past Janek Pulaski in the 3rd the Kraken’s main strategy is to avoid getting any more injuries at the hands of the most vicious team they’ve faced so far this season. Harry and Cooper both end up with fighting majors sometime in the 2nd and sit in the box together for five minutes, watching despondently as their teammates are shoved and battered out of the way by black and gold jerseys. Thank god, they only have two other games against these bastards this season, and they’re both at home.

“One more game, guys,” Harry tells everyone in the locker room. “After that we’re home again.” It’s all he can say to this.

At the hotel again after, Harry calls his mother because he hasn’t done that yet this month and then lies on the bed thinking while some soap opera plays on the tv. A knock breaks him out of his stupor and getting up to answer reveals Dale on the other side of the door.

“May I come in? I have pie,” Dale offers.

“Sure, Coop.”

Harry opens it the rest of the way and expects maybe a couple slices on plates, but Dale is holding an entire god damn pie. He’s in blue flannel pajamas and carries two plates in his other hand with the forks tucked in his chest pocket; how he actually knocked on the door is a mystery.

“What kinda pie?”

“Cherry.” Everything gets piled onto the side table and Dale glances at the tv. “Oh, this is terrible, Harry. You should watch cartoons instead.”

“What, like on Adult Swim?”

“No, absolutely not. I mean the kind intended for children.”

Harry snorts and shakes his head. “If you say so.” He flips around until he finds The Amazing World of Gumball. “Better?”

“Infinitely.” A slice of pie is shoved into his hands, and then a fork.

Somehow this ends up with both of them lying on the bed, heads propped up by pillows and plates of dessert food resting on their stomachs as they watch an animated blue cat-boy getting chased down a school hallway by a t-rex. After a few minutes, Harry has to admit that Dale must be onto something here, because he does actually start to feel a little better. Maybe he should adopt this post-loss ritual for himself.

“So I guess you were right to be worried,” Harry comments.

“Unfortunately, yes. I hope Albert will be alright.”

“I hope he’s back in play soon, Janek’s nowhere near as good and I hope Gordon puts our AHL callup in net for the game in Philly.” Harry takes the last bite of his current piece of pie and before he can even set down his fork Dale grabs the plate and puts a fresh slice on it, then sets it back in its place on his belly. Harry starts to laugh. “You fattening me up to eat me or something, Coop?”

“The pie is magic, eat it,” Dale demands.

Between the two of them, the pie is gone in under an hour while Cartoon Network plays on the tv screen at a low volume. Harry’s not sure how this translates to “conditions good for falling asleep in” to his brain, but he wakes up the next morning with a plate still sitting on him and the tv still on and  _ Dale cooper sleeping on the bed next to him. _ This isn’t even anything that scandalous, but it’ll be really hard to explain to the team if anyone sees Dale leaving his room this morning.

Harry grabs both plates and sets them aside, then pushes Dale’s shoulder. “Coop, get up. You fell asleep in my room and we have team breakfast to get to.”

Dale grumbles slightly, then rolls sideways, grabs onto Harry, snuggles right up, and falls back asleep. It’d be funny if it wasn’t so scary. Harry absolutely can  _ not _ be caught like this by his teammates.

“Dammit, Coop, get off,” he snaps, shoving Dale so hard he almost falls over the side of the bed.

Dale wakes up for real when this happens. “I had no intentions to sleep here.”

“I figured. Uh. When you leave, check and make sure nobody’s in the hall first,” Harry requests, then gets up and heads for the shower.

“…alright, I will,” Dale promises quietly.

Harry stops, not closing the door the rest of the way and leaning out of it slightly. “I don’t want them making fun of you,” he explains. “They will, too.”

“I see.”

“I mean it, Coop, it’s okay. Go get dressed, we have team breakfast.”

Harry makes excuses to himself in the shower that Dale has autism and won’t pick up that he wasn’t completely telling the truth. He doesn’t care what the world has to say about him because the world isn’t anybody he knows. But he’s really not ready for his teammates to know yet, that’s not something he can be okay with and this situation is the last thing he needs to be starting up rumors. Besides, if upper management thinks he’s sleeping with one of his teammates (whether he actually is or not) they’ll probably drag him for being unprofessional. On the other hand, he’s getting to be pretty good friends with Dale, and it’s true that he doesn’t want any of his friends to get made fun of for things they can’t help. And again there’s the issue of autism - Dale might not know where the line is drawn for friendly banter about this, especially after what happened on his last team, and might get discouraged because he feels like his teammates are attacking him. Harry doesn’t want that.

“Well you’re looking guilty this morning, Harry,” Hawk comments when Harry runs into him in the hallway heading down to breakfast. “What’d you do?”

Harry looks around to make sure it’s just the two of them. “I almost had a tabloid scandal on my hands this morning. Or a bad reaction from the team. Or both.” He describes the situation. “Nothing even happened. But if someone saw him leaving my room in his pajamas…” He lets it hang there.

“Well here’s my advice: don’t let him fall asleep in your hotel room anymore,” Hawk snorts.

“It was an accident.”

“Who are you really trying to protect here, Har? Coop can take care of himself, he’s been in this league for nine years. You don’t stick around that long without knowing what’s teasing and what isn’t from your guys.”

“Y’know I’m not sure he does, he’s been friends with Albert for however long but whenever Albert gets sarcastic with him he doesn’t even notice.”

“Okay, what aren’t you telling me?” Hawk prods.

Harry sighs. “Have you ever met my nephew, Hawk?”

“Frank’s son?”

“Yeah.”

“I think I did once when he was tiny and couldn’t walk yet. Why?”

“Well, Joey’s six now. They took him to doctors and behavior specialists and stuff a couple years ago, he’s on the spectrum.”

“You think Cooper is, too?”

“No, I  _ know _ he is, because he told me. And y’know maybe that’s part of why he left Philly, he said they cut his TOI for coming out but maybe that was the last straw because they just didn’t get him as a person. I’m not saying he reminds me so much of Joey, because he really doesn’t. But I’m a hockey player. Frank’s a hockey player. Joey always says he’s gonna be one, too. And if it’s not safe here for Coop, then it’s not safe for Joey, either.”

“It’s not your job to fix that, Harry.”

“But it is,” he snaps. “I’m the captain, this is my job, to take care of my team. Maybe you’re right and he doesn’t need my help with this kinda shit. But he hasn’t been here long enough for me to know for sure.”

“Maybe you should talk to him, then.”

They leave it at that and go down for breakfast.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hockey terminology:
> 
> TOI - Short for time on-ice, the average amount of time per game that you spend in play and not on the bench or in the box.
> 
> So this is the last chapter which will be posted on Saturday! :) Next week, ch. 7 will be posted on Friday, and ch. 8 will be posted on Monday, etc. so that this fic is now on the Monday/Friday update schedule and won't take quite so fucking long to be completely posted... all told, when all the chapters are up on AO3 it will count to about 72,000 words long (roughly the equivalent to a 300 page novel). Furthermore, on a twice-per-week schedule, I have counted it out and the final chapter will literally be going up on Christmas Day this year. It's so bizarre.


	7. Cheese-Steaks

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So! As of 23 July, 09:00 pacific time, this team irl is in fact named the Seattle Kraken. HOWEVER. Their color scheme is two different blues, not green with stripes. Oh well. Real life has no bearing on fic and I was not planning to change a single thing in this narrative to account for the budding NHL team's choices anyway. So, for the purposes of the fic, they're keeping the green jerseys.

“Alright, fellas, the very last thing we want is for this to go to a shootout,” Gordon says. “Shootouts are for the All-Star Weekend. Harry, Coop, Bobby, you’ll start sudden death for us.”

“Got it, chief,” Harry nods.

He pushes off slightly from the bench wall and turns around, then heads to the center dot. One of the things Harry hates the most about hockey is playing overtime - the format has never stopped feeling just a little bit weird to him, and then they might go to a shootout. Shootouts aren’t even really hockey, it’s just skill-tricks to try and beat a goalie. That’s not hockey. Hockey is multiple skaters on all at once with passing and body checks.

Three bright orange jerseys play stares with them as the linesman skates over, and then the puck drops. Harry’s feeling a little worn down by now but still manages to beat the guy standing across from him. In a way, he’s glad that Bobby got picked as their D-man for this - he doesn’t trust Bobby as much as he does Ed, but Bobby’s younger and is still playing like they’re at the start of the 1st.

They fan out, adjusting for the lack of their teammates, looking for the best mode of attack. The Flyers put out two D-men and one forward, and both D-men are never more than twelve feet from Dale. They know him, they know how dangerous he is. But that means there’s just one guy to try and stop two other Kraken players. Bobby whips it backwards to Harry, and as soon as the forward starts towards Harry he slaps it back to Bobby to be carried across the blue line. But Bobby is also not a goal-scorer. The puck ends up in the Flyers’ goalie’s glove and the whistle goes.

After this, it’s a revolving door of players from both sides, constantly changing out to compensate for fatigue. Harry’s really worried - Janek’s doing a lot better tonight than he did against the Bruins, but he’s still not Albert and a shootout probably won’t go well for the Kraken without Albert in net.

It goes to a shootout.

Harry groans when the clock expires and the buzzer sounds. He hates overtime and he hates shootouts especially. The Flyers are going first, and he can feel the whole bench holding its breath alongside him until Janek does actually manage to stop the puck from going in. To answer this, Hawk gets sent to shoot for them, but he also can’t plant it in the net. The second Flyer gets it past Janek and then it’s Harry’s turn. He steps onto the ice and charges forward, scooping the puck onto the blade of his stick and carrying it in a way that usually implies going for top shelf - but he doesn’t do that. Instead he slaps it straight along the ice to shoot in between the goalie’s leg pads. His teammates all cheer from the bench and he bumps his glove along theirs when he skates back. The third Flyer is up, but he somehow fumbles the puck and shoots it clumsily, an easy stop for Janek.

“Cooper,” Gordon orders.

Everyone who can reach taps on Dale’s helmet and shoulders as he leaves the bench for the center line. He makes it look beautiful, it’s more like watching a breakaway than a skills trick. Even from far away Harry could swear up and down that the Flyers’ goalie looks terrified, and that makes him happy. And apparently there’s every reason for this, because Dale manages to shoot it between the elbow and leg pad - such a tiny space, not many guys could make that shot, but Dale does because of course.

The Kraken piles onto the ice and mobs Dale, all yelling and tapping their helmets to his. Harry could almost kiss him. After the other night’s awful loss they really needed this win, and Dale got it for them. Harry grabs him for a hug, slapping his helmet at the same time. Dale laughs and does it back. It’s a big deal, though, because getting the game-winning goal in the shootout also gives Dale a hat-trick.

Lucy stops Dale to interview him and Harry hangs back to watch.

“This is probably a very important win for you tonight,” she starts.

“Most definitely. It was extremely satisfying.”

“Your teammates seem really proud of you all the time, does that put a lot of pressure on you to play better?”

“Not particularly. I play in the same manner that I’ve always played. I’m under the impression many of the fans believe I’m what makes the team great due to my inherent skills, but I can assure you and everyone watching that this isn’t the case.”

“Why not?”

“It is still a team effort. I average 21 minutes TOI per game. I’m not the one who stops goals, I’m not always capable of being correctly positioned to aid my lineys. I’m embarrassingly bad at defensive-forward tactics. And in general if I was asked to name one man who makes this team great, I would never say my own name.”

“So if someone did ask you that, who would you say instead?”

“Harry Truman,” Dale says automatically. “I have a great respect for him as a player, as a teammate, as my captain, as a man. But also as a friend. He works very hard to ensure a positive team culture, he’s very interested in making sure none of us feel excluded or ostracized. Most often, it’s believed that the head coach is the leader of the team. Make no mistake, Gordon is an incredible coach, I would pick nobody else to run our practices and games. But for us, the Kraken specifically, Harry is our leader. And he does a damn fine job at it, too.”

“Okay, thank you so much.”

“Thank you,” Dale nods, and then leaves.

Harry starts to chuckle. “You think someone paid him off to talk about me like that?”

“I don’t think so, he doesn’t seem very much like someone who would be easily bribed. And before you ask, because I know you’re thinking about it, no, I haven’t been able to sort things out with Andy yet because he’s just too busy playing games and I’m also too busy reporting so there hasn’t been time for it yet.”

“Okay, Lucy, but you gotta figure something out eventually.”

“I will,” she says, a little testily.

“Okay,” Harry agrees, and he heads for the locker room.

“Harry, we should go out for cheese-steaks,” Hawk insists as he sits in his stall.

“Are there any places open this time’a night?” he wonders.

“There are,” Dale nods. “Please trust me when I say I know all the best places for cheese-steaks.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Harry grins before yanking his jersey up over his head.

It ends up being like a school field trip. Dale brings them to his favorite spot, where it turns out the clerk already knows not to put any onions or peppers in his (which in Harry’s mind completely defeats the purpose of eating a cheese-steak, but he guesses it’s probably something to do with a sensory issue). The rest of them have normal orders. Bobby and Mike, who insisted on getting dragged along, get each other into a contest to see who can eat the fastest and end up making themselves sick. Andy forgets to ask them not to put peppers in his, either, and needs his EpiPen. Harry, Hawk and Dale quietly agree that next time just the three of them will go out to eat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hockey terminology:
> 
> Cheese-steaks - Delicious.
> 
> Shootout - A secondary round of overtime where individual players take turns trying to score on the other team's goalie. Shootouts aren't real hockey. I will not be argued with on this point.
> 
> Top shelf - Slang for the upper section of the net, usually means you're shooting for the corners over the goalie's shoulders.
> 
> This fic now has [fanart](https://aaronthe8thdemon.tumblr.com/post/624530151205634049/chacha-tortuga-has-done-it-again-this-time-for)! Mat did a fantastic job as always with Cooper dressed for an away game ^_^


	8. Tailored Environments

Harry finally decides to talk to Dale on the plane ride home. He explains everything he said to Hawk the other day and finishes up with, “If you don’t actually want any help, that’s fine. But if you do want it, it’s here.”

“Well, I appreciate the thought, Harry. If I ever do need it, I’ll be sure to ask.”

“So can you tell when people are kidding, though?”

“Sometimes. With Albert it’s difficult because he’s so grumpy to begin with. For you, I can usually tell.”

“That’s good, I guess,” Harry smiles.

“I endured some amount of therapy during my school years, which explained to me the broad strokes of how to read facial expressions and tone of voice. I’m not completely in the dark about it like some people are. Occasionally I’ll struggle, but it’s not insurmountable.”

“Yeah, my nephew sees about ten different doctors for this,” Harry nods. “I talk about it with my brother all the time. They’re doing the best they can, but he had to get put on medications. I guess it’s helping. I only see them during the summer.”

“The topic of medication pertaining to the autism spectrum is usually regarded as a controversial one,” Dale comments. “There are some schools of thought that believe any type of therapy to improve upon the ‘symptoms’ are a form of abuse. However, I do not belong to this group myself. If I hadn’t undergone the therapy and the special instructions, I wouldn’t be capable of playing in the NHL. It would simply be impossible. Many of these therapies are aimed at coping skills and learning tricks to make the world less uncomfortable for yourself. It’s a nice thought that the world instead should simply be made more accessible to autistic people. However, aside from the fact that the world we live in isn’t an ideal one, this goal is impractical to realize. Something that soothes one person will trigger the next one. I believe more should be done, yes, but it’s difficult to know which steps can be taken which will be universally helpful. Autism spectrum disorders present entirely differently from person to person. The environment would have to be tailored.”

“Yeah, I guess it would, wouldn’t it?”

Dale shakes his head. “Harry… I think the best way you could help with this is not to change any of the dynamics of our environment to suit my needs. Instead, help me find ways to get around those obstacles. The rest of the world hasn’t changed for me and I can’t expect hockey to change, either.”

“Okay, Coop, I’ll do my best,” he promises.

“Thank you. You’re a good friend, Harry.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay so this is not directly related to this chapter, but is an important topic which the fic goes into more detail later on: us hockey players are notoriously superstitious motherfuckers in pretty much every way shape and form, to the point of fearing the use of the wrong color of stick tape or having a specific pair of skate socks that are worn only for home games and things like that.
> 
> I JUST LEARNED THAT ONE OF THE BRUINS WILL CHANGE STICK-TYPE _MID-GAME_ AND I'M HORRIFIED. That shouldn't be _allowed_. In any case, most of you reading this won't probably understand why that freaks me out so bad, but I just needed to share it with people because it's stupid and absurd and I can't believe that's a thing.
> 
> (Also, feel free to ask about hockey superstitions in the comments, it's something I actually love talking about because some of them are _really_ ridiculous!)


	9. Fire

Harry is woken up by his phone ringing.

Grumbling, he rolls onto his back and slaps his hand around until it comes to the damn thing, and after squinting at the screen for a few seconds he swipes with his thumb to answer.

“Coop, it’s three in the morning.”

“Yes, I’m aware of the time. However I’m outside your door and knocking didn’t produce any effect. Will you let me in, please?”

“Uh… yeah, hang on.” He drops his phone on the side table and drags himself out of bed, not awake enough to realize he’ll be answering the door in a t-shirt and his underwear. He opens it and rubs his eyes. “The hell’s going on, Coop?”

“May I come in, Harry?”

“Yeah.” He steps aside and flicks on the light, and when his eyes adjust he’s surprised. “What happened? Why’re you all grubby like that?”

There’s black smudges on his face, his hair isn’t combed, he’s wearing his winter coat over his pajamas… he’s a mess.

Dale swallows. “Harry, my apartment building has just burned down.”

It takes a second for that to sink in. “The whole building?”

“Yes.”

“Well… shit. Uh. Here, siddown. I’ll make coffee.”

Harry fucks around with the coffee machine for a second and then goes back to his bedroom to put on a pair of sweatpants. He sits at the table across from Dale.

“I’ll have to order new equipment from CCM this morning.”

“Yeah.” Harry thinks - he’s so tired, his brain is slow. “I have an old set you can probably wear, we’re about the same size. The stuff’s all beat up, though. What about your skates?”

“No, I still have those, they’re with the equipment staff for a minor repair. I also have several sticks with them.”

“Okay. You’ll still be able to come to practice, then. It shouldn’t take too long for you to get in a new set of your own stuff. Did you lose anything else important?”

“I’ll have to purchase new clothes. I was able to retrieve my wallet and my passport while I was leaving.”

“Good. Coop… this really sucks. But I promise, it’s not the end’a the world, okay? You can just stay here with me for a couple days and we’ll get everything sorted out.”

Dale nods. “Thank you Harry.” Then he snorts inwards and his face crumples. “This is absolutely ridiculous considering the circumstances,” he whimpers, “but my laptop was there. Everything is backed up online but I really liked that laptop.”

Harry’s seen this laptop, actually. Dale’s brought it along for games and always seemed really fond of it.

“It’s a Dell, right?”

“Yes.”

Harry gets up from the table and pulls Dale after him into a hug.

“Listen. The most important thing here is you’re not hurt. All that stuff can get replaced. There isn’t another one of you.”

“Yes, I know,” Dale wavers, rubbing his face on Harry’s shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, you have a real good reason to feel bad right now,” Harry soothes, rubbing his back. “Let’s just drink some coffee, you can have a shower and get all this black shit off you and then we’ll go to sleep. Tomorrow morning I’ll dig up my backup pads for you and then we’ll go out for breakfast before practice. Okay?”

“Alright,” he agrees after a second.

Harry gives him one last pat on the back before letting go to pour the mugs of coffee. They sit quietly and drink for a few minutes, then Harry borrows Dale a pair of sweatpants and a flannel to sleep in and points him to the shower. After that he goes to one of his closets and throws stuff around until he finds his old pads, which he kept as a backup in case something happened to his current set. Looking them over, they’re pretty beat to shit but they’ll do for a practice until Dale can get new stuff, so he pulls everything out and sprays it all with Febreze before piling it up on his couch. Hopefully Dale won’t mind wearing Warrior pads instead of CCM for a few hours. Thank god his skates didn’t also get destroyed, because those aren’t something you can borrow out to somebody else.

Dale emerges again and sees the heap of gear.

“Oh, thank you, Harry.”

“Don’t mention it. Alright, we gotta sleep.”

“Yes. I can just move all of that to the chair-”

“No, absolutely not,” Harry argues. “After the night you’ve had the last thing I’m gonna do is banish you to the couch. Come on.”

“But Harry, you’ve thrown me off your bed previously.”

“I won’t do that this time.”

Harry knows he’s a blanket hog (his last boyfriend and his two girlfriends before that had all told him so on no uncertain terms), so he finds a spare comforter and gives it to Dale and then they both lie down. He rolls onto his side so that he faces away from Dale and almost immediately falls asleep.

The next morning isn’t a scramble, but it is a lot different from how his day usually starts out. After coffee, Dale doesn’t get dressed right away but instead goes into the living room and tries on all the pads to make sure they’ll work for him on the ice. Once that’s settled, they load everything into the back of Harry’s truck and then go to IHOP. It’s not the best or healthiest option but Harry doesn’t have enough food in his fridge for both of them and there’s not a huge chance of them running into reporters at a place like that - most athletes prefer nicer restaurants for breakfast. Thankfully, he’s right, and after trucker’s stacks of pancakes they finally go to the practice arena.

“I’ll bring this in for you, go talk to Gordon,” Harry offers, gently grabbing the gear bag from him.

“Thanks, Harry. I’ll be in to dress for practice shortly.”

Harry drops the bag into Dale’s stall, then sits in his own and starts putting everything on - leg socks, pants, skates, shin pads, pull the leg socks down _over_ the shin pads and then tape. He’s strapping on his elbow pads when Albert comes in.

“You cleared yet?”

“Not for play, practice only and no contact,” the goalie complains. “God forbid I get an injury I can just ignore like a broken nose or something.”

“That might not be a good idea, your nose is already pretty bad,” Harry chirps him.

“You have a mullet,” Albert shoots back. “At least my bad looks aren’t by choice.”

“He keeps his hair that way to hide his huge ears,” Hawk supplies, which gets a snicker out of most of the guys in the room.

Harry pretends to be hurt. “I thought you could keep a secret, Hawk!”

“It had to come out sometime and you know it.”

The whole locker room devolves into volleys of insults towards each other’s looks after that. Harry doesn’t do anything to stop them because this is pretty typical and it’s usually harmless. He pulls down his chest/shoulder pads over his head and does all the Velcro straps, and finally his jersey. He shoves the ends of the sleeves up onto his elbows before pulling the blade guards off his skates.

Dale comes in finally and also starts getting dressed. Harry has weird feelings as he watches his own stuff going onto his friend, and he doesn’t really know how to describe what he’s thinking if anyone asks.

“Aren’t those your old pads?” Hawk whispers on his right.

“Yeah, his apartment building burned down last night, almost everything has to get replaced. He said he’s gonna call up CCM after practice, or maybe the equipment guys’ll do it for him.”

The most bizarre thing is how Dale’s practice jersey reads 59 like always, but he’s borrowing one of Harry’s helmets, which has 46 on it. He’s in Harry’s pads and partially with Harry’s number, and Harry himself just doesn’t know what the hell to do with that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn't even notice until after the first hundred viewings of the show, but Harry does in fact have a fucking mullet. It's just that his hair is so damn _curly,_ so it's really hard to tell at first (or at least it was for me).
> 
> Also, this is very important: from 10 August to 14 August, I won't have internet access because I'm going camping with my family out in the woods. Since those bookending days are a Monday and a Friday, chapters 12 and 13 will both be posted at once on the morning of 9 August (Sunday). So, two chapters will go up at once, and then nothing for the rest of the week until the Saturday update on a different fic. After that, things will resume as normal.


	10. Laptop

Harry wakes up from his pregame nap and finds a package sitting on his porch, but he doesn’t open it. Instead he goes back into his bedroom and wakes up his friend.

“Hey, Coop, get up. I have a surprise for you.”

“Hmm?” Dale mumbles, not opening his eyes or even moving all that much.

“Come on, you’ll like it.”

Dale eventually drags himself out of bed and follows Harry to the living room where the box is. Harry hands it to him and then a utility knife to cut the tape with, then stands back to watch. Thank god for overnight shipping.

“Harry… if this turns out to be something other than what I’m expecting, I’ll be extremely upset with you,” Dale says through a huge grin.

“I got at least pretty close, right?” he asks as the flaps are finally pulled open.

“It’s identical,” Dale confirms, pulling the new laptop out of the shipping box and taking all the plastic and everything off it. “Unbelievable. I bought that computer at least five years ago, how did you find this?”

“By scouring eBay for three hours until I came across the right one that wasn’t already used,” Harry answers dryly. “That’s not even really important. You’ve got clothes again so you don’t have to keep borrowing mine, your new pads are waiting for you at the arena for tonight, and you’ve got one’a these again. Hopefully that’s enough to keep you afloat until you can get everything else in order.”

“Oh, definitely,” Dale agrees. “And here I’d already tried to grudgingly settle for the idea of purchasing a different and much-inferior laptop. Harry Truman, you are my _hero._ ”

Harry laughs. “You’re welcome. Alright, you can play with it later, we’ve got a game to get to.”

They drive to the arena and the equipment staff give them their alternate jerseys and leg socks for tonight. Harry actually really likes their third uniforms, so this makes him happy and he has a good feeling about tonight’s game even though Albert’s still out for at least another week. And they’re playing the Sharks, who so far this season haven’t been doing great, so there’s a decent chance things will go okay for them.

The game gets off to a weird start. First the blade on a linesman’s skate breaks and play has to stop ten seconds in, and for some reason a Shark that Harry’s never seen before and who must be a rookie decides to pick a fight with Mike, which is _never_ a good idea. So they keep going with a 4-on-4 situation. It’s bizarre. After that, though, the 1st isn’t all that interesting except for Andy scoring a goal, which is rare.

In the locker room during the first intermission: “We need to pick up the pace, fellas,” Gordon orders. “This is not a good team, this is not a _smart_ team, we’re much better and we should be acting like it. We’re up by one, let’s see if we can’t get to at least three by the end of the next period. Coop, you usually have either a hat trick or two fighting majors by now. Bobby, you’re skating like you ate rocks for dinner. We’re better than this, so let’s show them that we are.”

Onto the bench for the 2nd. Their checking line starts, and Harry watches proudly as they already work a lot harder than earlier. Besides Gordon’s pep-talk in the locker room tonight, Harry also spoke to each of them yesterday during practice about how they tend to lag during the 2nd and 3rd periods a little bit. Apparently something got through to them finally.

When Harry’s line is up, this same rookie who got into it with Mike (and lost) now tries the same thing with Dale. And it’s even more brutal than the first time, because Dale fucking thrashes him. Both are sent to the box and Harry hopes the little shit has learned his lesson this time. He knows most of his guys won’t back down from a fight, and that’s not really a good thing; he needs them out of the sin-bin so they can make plays and score goals. He does manage to plant their second tonight (shorthanded, no less, which he’s very proud of himself for) on a pass from Hawk - Kraken goal by Number Forty Six Harry Truman, assisted by Number Thirty Seven Tommy Hill. Harry will never get sick of hearing that.

The second intermission comes, and this time Harry gets up to talk to them.

“Alright, guys, look. We’re doing okay out there right now. Remember what Gordon said during the first intermission, we’re way ahead of these bastards skill-wise. I wanna add, though, that we don’t probably need to pour everything we’ve got into beating them. We’re playing Calgary tomorrow and they’re a lot tougher. So do what you can to keep the Sharks down, but don’t spend yourselves when we have back-to-back games. It’s possible to do both. Also, stop letting that damn kid pick fights with you, especially you, Coop. I need you on the ice with me and not in the penalty box.”

“Are you playing favorites with us now, cap?” Bobby calls out from the back of the locker room.

“Button it,” Harry says sharply, jabbing a finger at him. “I don’t really think I need to say much more about this. You all know your jobs, I’m sure you’ll pull it off. That’s it.”

He goes back to his stall and drinks some water. A 2-0 is fine when Albert’s the one stopping enemy pucks from going in, but Albert isn’t back yet and Janek’s goaltending is unpredictable at best. Despite his perpetual grouchiness, Harry can’t help wishing he had _two_ Alberts.

The 3rd - Dale was apparently paying attention, because he scores two goals in five minutes with only one Sharks goal between those to put the Kraken up 4-1. Both of them are assisted by Harry and he just knows there’s going to be jokes in the locker room after that their “epic bromance” is also fueling their hockey skills. He doesn’t mind that much, but he’s also horribly aware that those jokes will inevitably give way to “our captain is secretly gay” jokes. Those, he can’t stand.

They go home that night with a score of 4-2. Harry can tell, though, that for once Dale doesn’t care about the game they just played - he wants to get home and set up his new laptop. It’s kinda funny, because Harry’s nephew has an iPad that he’s unhealthily attached to. Who knew Dale is also like that. Sure, Harry’s seen him taking it everywhere when they go for away games, but he never connected the dots until now that it’s autism-related.

“Coop, what is it with you and that damn thing?” Harry asks when they’re sitting on the couch together and he’s watching Dale bring the new laptop to life.

“I enjoy the practical applications of a device which comes standard with a physical keyboard,” Dale explains. “Touchscreen electronics are all well and good for the majority of the population, but they irritate me in a way I’m not able to fully comprehend or explain. And in a sense, I enjoy the sensation of the keys moving under my fingertips. It’s much more helpful for writing emails.”

“You send a lotta emails, there, Coop?”

“In point of fact, I do. I prefer it over text messages with phones and I still have friends in Philadelphia who I’ve maintained contact with.” Dale finally tears his eyes away from the screen and smiles. “Thank you, Harry. This is a wonderful gift.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hockey terminology:
> 
> 4-on-4 - When both teams have a penalty at the same time, and so both are shorthanded from having players in the box.
> 
> Pregame nap - An absolute necessity for professional or even semi-professional players.


	11. Knuckle Fracture

The Flames - Harry has a little bit of a weird relationship with this team, even now. They were the ones who drafted his older brother, and Frank played with them for four years before getting traded to the Stars for one season and then going  _ back _ to the Flames before finally settling with the Bolts down in Tampa and becoming team captain there. So, Harry’s watched a lot of Flames games, even when he was drawn into professional hockey himself just a year after his brother. This deep into their careers, they still DVR each other’s games on nights they can’t watch live, except the rare occasion they play against each other.

Right now, Harry’s not thinking about that - he’s much more interested in beating alt-captain Preston King to a bloody pulp.

It shouldn’t have been a big deal. Harry passed to Dale and then Dale got checked. Or at least that’s how it looked for the first two seconds, until Dale dropped on his ass and flung away his gloves so he could rip off his helmet and start holding his face. The Flames’ alt-captain had fucking elbowed Dale in the face, on purpose. Harry never heard a whistle and so assumed there wasn’t one.

Now, he’s thrown his own gloves to grab King by the jersey with one fist and start wailing on him with the other. King swings back wildly, barely able to actually land a hit, while Harry repeatedly beats him in the head until his helmet actually goes flying off and he falls backwards, plunging them both down to the ice. At this point the linesmen pry Harry off him.

Harry ends up going down the tunnel with Dale, who’s staggering a little in a way that has nothing to do with trying to walk with skates on something other than a rink. That’s never a good sign.

“You okay, Coop?”

“My head hurts,” Dale whines, frantically wiping blood out from under his nose. He grabs onto Harry for support as they walk and Harry puts an arm across his back. “I’m sure they’re going to put me in the quiet room.”

“Maybe it won’t be that bad,” Harry tries to soothe him. “Besides, at least you know the fucker got what he deserved.”

“My knight in shining armor, Harry.”

He chuckles. “Yeah, something like that.”

This is really bad, actually. Their goalie is still out until probably the end of next week. Now Dale is acting concussed and Harry’s pretty sure he broke his hand while trying to break someone else’s face. So no goalie, no captain, no assistant captain. Ed will have to lead the team.

The worst part is Will, who’s been the senior medical trainer since before Harry was even on this team. He’s old and experienced. He also takes one look at Dale - “You’re concussed.” and one look at Harry - “That middle knuckle is fractured.” And after that there’s no arguing. He always knows at a glance, and he’s always,  _ always _ right.

“God dammit,” Harry complains as he sits and lets Will poke at his busted hand.

“Did he have it coming?”

“Oh hell yeah, he elbowed my winger in the face.”

“I see. And now you’ve got two injuries instead of just one. What’ve I said about your temper, Harry?”

“It couldn’t be helped,” Harry lies.

“You’re going to need x-rays and you’ll be out for at least three weeks,” Will tells him. “Go get undressed, I’ll put your arm in a sling and you can go to the hospital.”

“Okay, but I’m not leaving without Coop, he can’t drive home like that. I’ll drop him off first and then go get looked at.”

“Alright, but you’ll have a hell of a time driving left-handed.”

“I’ll figure it out, don’t worry.”

His hand gets put in a splint in the meantime and he goes to take off his pads. Three weeks… what the hell will he do with himself for three weeks without hockey? Well, a lot of physical therapy. He can still do most of his workout routine, probably. He’ll have to look after Dale until the concussion goes away. He’ll watch Frank’s games. Harry strips off his compression clothes and sighs, not bothering to shower and just rubbing away the sweat from his body with a towel before struggling just to pull his boxer-briefs on. He’s not left-handed at all, and this is looking like a really annoying three weeks already.

Dale comes in. “I have a concussion. They won’t allow me to perform any activities for at least one week and then I’ll be evaluated a second time.”

“I broke a knuckle. You’ll be home with me all day,” Harry chuckles.

“Oh, fantastic,” Dale says, not at all sarcastically. “I’m confident you’ll take good care of me.”

“Sure thing, Coop.”

Harry takes a bunch of Advil and finishes getting dressed, then throws his stuff in his gear bag and leaves his jersey for the equipment staff. They go out to Harry’s truck and head home.

“Did you really throw hands with him just for me?” Dale asks while he’s struggling to drive with just one hand.

“Yeah, of course. He gave you a god damn concussion, Coop. I couldn’t let him get away with that. What if he broke your nose, too?”

“Oh, he didn’t. I can assure you only my brain has been injured.”

“Yeah, that’s  _ so _ much better!”

“Shhh, don’t shout, Harry. It hurts.”

“Sorry.”

They get home and Harry figures with Dale like this he can wait to go get x-rays tomorrow morning. They start getting ready for bed and this time he does shower, just to get the smell off his skin. Climbing into bed, he’s surprised when Dale crawls over and snuggles up to him without shame.

“Coop…” he groans.

“I’m hurt,” his friend whines, probably deliberately pathetically.

Harry groans a second time. At least in his house he knows they won’t be caught like this.

“Cuddles won’t heal your concussion any faster.”

“No, but they certainly improve my mood. Cuddle me, Harry,” Dale demands.

Okay, now he has to laugh, because this is just ridiculous. “Fine, dammit. Don’t say I never gave you anything.” Harry slides his good arm around Dale and they fall asleep like that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't forget, guys, I won't have internet access for most of next week, so on Sunday chapters 12 and 13 will both be posted ahead of schedule so that you aren't deprived of two entire fic updates :)


	12. Tickets

“You poor dumb bastard,” Frank laughs on the other end.

“This isn’t funny!” Harry snaps. “I have to go back there and get a fucking surgery on my hand so that it’ll heal faster and I can get back to playing sooner!”

“You broke your hand fighting someone else’s battle, Har. That’s kinda funny. Couldn’t your liney do the punching himself?”

“No, because he got concussed and was sitting on the ice holding his face.”

“Y’know I saw some article about you two the other day. Apparently sports journalism includes spinning up rumors that you and Cooper are secretly dating.”

“We’re not,” Harry groans. “His apartment was in a fire and he got hurt four days later, so he’s just staying over with me for longer than expected. I can’t leave him by himself right now, he doesn’t even know how to cook! God fucking knows how he took care of himself when he was with the Flyers.”

“My friends’ wives would cook extra and the leftovers were gifted to me,” Dale yells from the living room in explanation.

Harry rolls his eyes and holds his phone away for a second. “Coop, what’ve I told you about private conversations?”

“Sorry, Harry, I’ll do better.”

He puts his phone to his ear again. “I’ll have to do a bunch of PT for it, too.”

“That sucks, Har.” Then, distantly: “Get out from underfoot!”

“That Joey?”

“Yeah, he wants to talk to you.”

“He can if he wants, put him on.”

There’s a brief pause.

“Hi!” Joey yells into the phone. “Dad said you punched somebody!”

“Hey, buddy. I  _ did _ punch somebody,” Harry chuckles. “And I hurt my hand on his face, that’s why you really shouldn’t punch people.”

“But I’m gonna play in the NHL too and then I have to!”

“No, not every player gets in fights. Now listen: when you’re in the NHL, are you gonna play for Kraken or for the Lightning?”

“Kraken!” Joey shouts enthusiastically.

“That’s my boy,” Harry laughs. “What do you want for Christmas this year?”

“Tickets!”

“I don’t know, I live really far away.”

“But Uncle Harry you’re playing against the Panthers in February!”

“Oh, you’ve been looking at my game schedule?”

“Yup! Dad gets jealous, he wants me to watch him instead. I can like both!”

“Yeah, you sure can. Okay, I’ll think about some tickets for you to come see us play in Miami. Those’ll be real easy to get, too.”

“’Cuz nobody likes the Panthers!”

“That’s right, nobody likes the Panthers.”

“But  _ lots _ of people like you, Uncle Harry!”

“Yeah, our stadium’s usually pretty full. Someday when you’re bigger and flying’s not so hard I’ll try to get you tickets to come see me up here, but only if you promise to wear a jersey with my number on it and not your dad’s,” Harry grins.

“Okay, I will! I’m already good for hockey because my teeth fall out all by themselves now! I lost two already, right on the top!”

“That happens to everybody, first of all. And when you’re a grown-up, losing teeth is bad. We try not to lose teeth, that’s why mouthguards were invented.”

“Did you lose some?”

“Not since the last time you asked. Alright, give the phone back to dad.”

“Okay, bye!”

“He wants tickets?”

“Yeah, we’re in town to play the Panthers in a couple months, I figure if you’re out for a game Doris can bring him.”

“Fine with me. Speaking of Christmas, who’s coming to who this year?”

“I can just fly down, I know how hard it is for him to be on a plane. Besides, it’s warm and not shitty down there. I’ll come to you.”

“Okay. Will you bring your boyfriend?”

“Frank, stop.”

“You talk about him a lot.”

“Shut up.”

“You’ve only known him a few weeks and you already love him so much.”

“Okay, get fucked. I’m hanging up now.”

“You’re such a baby, Harry.”

“Goodbye, Frank, you asshole.”

Harry ends the call and puts his phone in his pocket, then glares resentfully at his bad hand for a second. Damn Preston King for doing this to him.

“Was it a productive conversation?” Dale asks when Harry comes into the living room and drops down on the couch.

“Kinda. He made fun of me a lot.” Harry scoops up his remote and searches for something to watch. “Will you be okay here tomorrow while I go get my hand chopped up?”

“Most likely, but I appreciate the concern.”


	13. Anesthesia

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ATTENTION!!!!!
> 
> FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO MAY HAVE MISSED PREVIOUS WARNINGS, CHAPTERS 12 AND 13 ARE BOTH GOING UP AT ONCE AHEAD OF SCHEDULE BECAUSE I WILL NOT HAVE INTERNET ACCESS FOR THE COMING WEEK AND WOULD OTHERWISE MISS BOTH UPDATES
> 
> IF YOU HAVE CLICKED THE LINK TO COME STRAIGHT TO CHAPTER 13, GO BACK ONE CHAPTER BECAUSE YOU MAY HAVE MISSED CHAPTER 12
> 
> THIS CONCLUDES OUR PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

“If you puke in my car it won’t end well for you,” Albert threatens from the driver’s side.

Harry mumbles something - he’s not sure what - back at his goalie and sinks deeper into the seat. He still can’t feel his entire lower arm and apparently he’ll be woozy from the anesthesia for awhile. He also doesn’t really care about any of this, he just wants to get home and sleep for fifty six thousand years.

They get back to his house and he struggles just to get out of the car, which means he ends up with Albert under his good arm taking most of his weight. Dale lets them in and Harry is dropped onto the couch like a giant bag of potatoes. That’s how he feels right now, like a bag of something, not really alive but still there. His hand is in a cast halfway up to his elbow and that cast is in a sling for right now, something about keeping his hand elevated to help swelling or whatever. It’s not permanent.

“Try to get him to eat something later,” Albert tells Dale, somewhere far away.

“I don’t know how to cook.”

“You two are such toddlers,” Albert gripes.

“Albert if you can stomach the idea of staying to help for the day it would be greatly appreciated.”

An exasperated sigh. “Fine. But I have to go for my workout with the medical trainers in an hour. I’ll come back after that.”

“Thank you, Albert.”

Harry’s not sure, but he feels like a whole chunk of time just runs away from him and never comes back, because right after that he’s opening his eyes and it’s 2:45 in the afternoon already. He’s still lying down on the couch and his hand is a little achy under his cast. He closes his eyes again and then there’s a palm on his shoulder.

“Harry, wake up. You should eat.”

He opens his eyes and sees Dale, then the clock - 6:02 pm. Anesthesia is weird.

Harry pries himself up off the couch and sits at his kitchen table, where heaped plates of chicken penne alfredo are waiting for each of them. Thank god Albert knows how to cook, Harry and Dale probably would’ve sat here and starved until Harry got his bearings back. The most important thing here is that this is something he can eat with just one hand.

“Hey Coop, did you check and see if the Bolts are playing tonight?”

“Oh, yes, they’re facing off with Anaheim in slightly more than an hour.”

“Good, I’ll get to tease Frank if he loses.” Harry starts eating before Albert has even sat down. “Mm. This’s good, you might actually trick me into thinking you give a shit about my wellbeing.”

“Don’t get sentimental,” Albert grumps as he also sits.

Dale is picking at his with his fork. “There are no onions in this, correct?”

“Don’t start with that shit,” Albert groans, rolling his eyes.

“Albert, from my perspective chewing on a piece of cooked onion is a texture akin to eating a worm if worms decided to grow bones.”

Harry almost throws up just from that description. “Jesus, Albert, just tell him if there’s onions or not!”

“No! There are no fucking onions in this!”

“Thank you,” Dale says calmly, and immediately starts eating his pasta.

“You and your damn food compulsions, this is why nobody likes eating with you, Coop.”

“Using the technical term they’re known as sensory issues-”

“Yes, I know, you said that already.”

Harry kind of wants to deck his teammate for this… he doesn’t, though (mostly because his hand is broken already).

“Albert, cut the shit.”

Harry doesn’t miss that Dale smiles a tiny bit when he yells at their goalie, and that feels… weird. But not in a bad way, somehow. _What’s the joke, Coop?_ he wonders, but he doesn’t say it and just keeps eating his dinner.


	14. Accepting Shortcomings

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm back safe and sound from my camping trip! :) The posting schedule will resume as normal going forward.
> 
> On a kind-of related note to this fic, I recently acquired a copy of the DSM-III-R, which was in use in 1989 when Twin Peaks takes place. For autism (then called "autistic disorder"), there's a set of 16 possible criteria, 8 or more of which need to be met to qualify for the diagnosis. Based only on his behavior in the show and not accounting for my own headcanons and popular fan theories... Cooper scored a 12.

Thanksgiving comes and goes before either of them are allowed back on the ice. Coincidentally, Harry and Dale will both be returning to play for the same game. Even more coincidentally, it’s their only home game against the Lightning for the whole season.

The day of this game, Frank meets up with Harry for lunch.

“Can I ask something, Har?”

“Only if it’s not just a lead-in for you to make fun of me.”

Frank glances up from his menu. “What’s really going on with you and Cooper?”

“Nothing. He’s staying over with me after his apartment building burned down.”

“That was almost a month ago.”

“Frank, what’re you getting at, here?” Harry growls.

“Just curious. How long’s it been since you were seeing anybody?”

“I don’t know, maybe a couple years? Why?”

“You talk about him a lot on the phone.”

“He’s my friend.”

“I have friends on my team, too. How often do you hear about them?” Frank points out.

“I don’t think I wanna talk about _this_ anymore,” Harry decides.

“I hope you know that by saying that you automatically make me think you’re sleeping with your coworker.”

“Frank, I don’t give a shit what you think. I’m not sleeping with him, I’m not seeing him, I’m not even interested in him like that to begin with. He’s my friend and I’m helping him out. That’s really honest and truly all there is to it.”

The waiter approaches and they both order big steaks with baked potatoes and salads because whenever they meet during the season to play against each other it’s part of the ritual: if they see each other at breakfast, Belgian waffles, and if they meet at lunch, steaks. Huge, juicy steaks with mushrooms and onions served over top. To go with these steaks, they also have nice expensive beers. Harry long ago realized he didn’t even need most of his several million dollars per year salary, he has a good truck and a nice house and he doesn’t really want more than that. He knows most guys aren’t like this, but at least half of his earnings from the NHL get quietly donated to charities that try to improve the resources available for autistic people because he wants things to get better for Joey. That doesn’t mean he can’t eat at top-tier restaurants with Frank once in awhile, though, or buy hockey tickets for his family members. It leaves him to wonder sometimes where most other players’ money goes… probably college funds for their spoiled kids.

“So who do you think’ll make the playoffs this year?” Harry asks, desperate to change the subject.

“Which conference?”

“Ah, start with yours first.”

“We might,” Frank shrugs. “I have a good group of guys this year, they got whipped into shape in no time. Let’s see, who else… probably the Habs, they’ve been on a tear so far, too. I hope the Bruins don’t, I’m so sick’a those fuckers.”

“Amen to that,” Harry grumbles, remembering how his team got throttled a few weeks back. “Maybe if they do, they’ll end up with the damn Habs and both those teams’ll punch each other to death before they even get close to the Final…”

“The Bruins don’t have that many Cups, history’s not in their favor anyway.”

“Yeah, I guess not.”

“So for your conference, I definitely see your boys getting there, you’ll be first or second in the west. Vegas probably will again just because they usually do. Edmonton’s doing alright but they’re inconsistent, so who can say for sure.”

“Well, thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“Harry, you’re a good team. There’s a reason I hate playing you and it’s not because we’re related.”

Harry grins. “It can’t be helped. We’re gonna kick your ass tonight.”

Frank rolls his eyes and shakes his head. “So anything else I should know while I’m here?”

“Uh… I’m gonna come out to my team finally.”

This earns him a look of surprise. “Really.”

“Solidarity, we’re doing a big huge thing for Pride Night this season. I’ve heard a few ideas so far, there’s some good ones.”

“Good luck with that, then. Any other players doing it, too?”

“Yeah…”

“Who?”

“Cooper.”

“I fucking knew it.”

“Frank, shut up. And for the love of god and shorthanded goals, don’t go telling that to people.”

“I won’t, I won’t. I know the drill. So presumably you’re coming out to your team way before Pride Night actually happens so that they’re not all shocked.”

“Yeah, I’m gonna do it tonight after we’re done dragging your team’s sorry ass all over the ice,” Harry grins.

“You wish, pipsqueak.” An old running joke - Harry’s actually an inch or two taller than Frank, but when they were little kids he was always the smaller one. Frank probably has ten or fifteen pounds of muscle on Harry, though, so it evens out a bit in the end. “We’ll go home ten to one tonight after leaving you in a crying pile on your own rink.”

Their lunch and the rest of Harry’s day progress as normal. A pregame nap and all his other small rituals, side-by-side with Dale’s small rituals which all things considered aren’t even really that strange for any hockey player. Their game against the Lightning - a tough match, but Albert is rock-solid like always and Dale is supernaturally precise as normal. A 4-1 victory despite Frank’s best efforts.

And then comes the moment of truth, which Harry’s been quietly dreading all day.

“Alright, before you guys all break up to go home, there’s a big event coming up for us that you all know about: Pride Night,” Harry starts. “I think it’s important this year to really emphasize, also, the whole ‘hockey is for everyone’ thing too. The NHL needs to make it normal for guys to play who are gay, who are neurodivergent, all that kinda stuff. So as far as I know, there’s two players on the team this year who’re planning on making some really big announcements to a whole arena of fans, first of all, and then to the rest of the world who’s watching on tv. Dale, you wanna start?”

“Thank you, Harry. Alright, due to my ill-timed confession several weeks ago, everyone is aware that I’m gay. This is a fact I’m perfectly comfortable with sharing and it will be a weight off my shoulders to know that I’m no longer concealing it from the press no matter how vile they try to make me with their words afterwards. However, there is a second topic for discussion which will also be revealed at the same time, which is that I am on the autism spectrum. This one is significantly more difficult for me to talk about and frankly I’m also amazed at myself for having hidden it for so long and from so many people. I’ve only been on this team for a short time, but I’ve observed among the usual trash-talk and roughhousing a significant vein of respect and even love in our locker room and on our bench. This helps assure me that you all are capable of being supportive of me on this issue.”

“And who’s our other sacrificial victim for January?” Albert comments with a look on his face that says he’s already figured out the answer for himself.

Harry takes a deep breath. “Me.” All eyes are on him and he swallows. “First off, let me just apologize for being dishonest with everyone for all this time. But I think everyone in here knows how it feels to be rejected for something you can’t help, and how scary that really is sometimes. The thing is, I know a few of you have seen me going on dates or being in relationships with women before. But I also go out with other men, too. My most recent relationship was with another guy, actually. Now if anyone wants to be mad at me for not trusting them enough to be honest about this, that’s perfectly fine and I understand that. But at the same time, let’s not turn it into a big thing. We’re still a hockey team and we still have a job to do. So however you feel - keep it off the ice like usual.” He clears his throat. “Uh. That’s it.”

The locker room stays quiet. After a stupidly long and really uncomfortable moment, Harry notices Albert glance around before standing up out of his stall so he can come over… and tap his palm on Harry’s shoulder. Slowly, still in silence, the rest of the team follows suit, touching his shoulders or upper arms or sometimes ruffling his hair. By the end of this the corners of his mouth hurt from smiling so hard. Hawk and Dale go last, pulling him up off the bench and hugging him instead. It’s a general acceptance of him and his shortcomings, because he’s still their captain and they don’t need to say anything.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hockey terminology:
> 
> Neurodivergent - This term is not hockey-specific. Very often it means an autistic person, but it can also apply to ADHD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Tourette's syndrome, a mental health problem, or really any psychological difference that mainstream society would deem "abnormal." (And fuck you, mainstream society, for thinking that.)
> 
> Small rituals - Hockey players are VERY superstitious and tend to be routine-oriented for anything that happens the day of a game. Goalies in particular are like this to an extreme, but most skaters are too to some extent. So what this means in context to the fic is that there will be a few tiny pointless things that Harry and Cooper do for themselves before a game because they think it's lucky. For example, when I'm driving to the arena to play a game I will have a very specific song playing in my truck. [See also: Hockey gods, ch. 32]


	15. Diane,

It’s a parade of hockey players - they all need to get done with makeup and everything for the damn cameras, which takes time, so some of the younger guys are chirping each other and roughhousing while everyone stands around waiting. It’s the main roster, plus six of their most-often used AHL callups and then Gordon and the assistant coaches.

“Hey, knock it off,” Harry barks when the horseplay starts getting a little too involved.

All this effort for him to say one or two lines in front of the camera… although in the case of him and a few other guys, there’ll be more later on after this part. There’s a couple weeks for this to all get filmed and then edited, and Harry’s always amazed how this kinda stuff gets done on time because he knows, however vaguely, that a lot of work gets put into it.

“How much are they making you say?” Hawk asks, standing next to him like always.

“I don’t know, most of it comes later. It might not actually be scripted, who knows.”

Dale emerges from the camera room and everyone holds out their palms for him to slap as he walks all the way back to sit while he waits to get called in again. Actually, since the big reveals last week after the game with the Lightning, Harry’s been really impressed with his team’s support of Dale. A couple guys had autistic friends growing up, one has a daughter with the disorder, and so a pretty good level of understanding has been achieved. The only one allowed to make fun of him for it is Albert, and only because he and Dale have known each other for so long and Dale’s okay with it.

Harry chuckles a little as one of the staff gives Dale his laptop so he can sit and do whatever it is he really does with it while he waits - from the look of it, typing another email to Diane Evans. He once read one of them to Harry out loud and these emails are usually really long and ramble about all kinds of things that aren’t even that well connected to each other. Diane apparently is one of the equipment staff on the Flyers that Dale made friends with as a rookie, and they still talk at least every other day despite him getting traded.

The line moves along slowly. They’re all in their home jerseys for this, but not in full pads, which - thank god. Harry would hate that, they’d all be standing around sweating themselves to death and walking with skate guards. Instead most of them are in blue jeans or track pants, so at least they get to be comfortable while doing this. Sometimes it looks funny, because Janek’s and Albert’s jerseys are like tents wrapping their shoulders without the bulk of the goalie armor to go underneath. Harry still rolled his sleeves up to his elbows like he does when he’s wearing pads just out of force of habit, and that’s probably a little weird, too.

Finally, at last, it’s Harry’s turn. After all that standing around, he’s sitting in a chair in front of the camera for like thirty seconds before he gets sent back out again to sit with Dale.

“Whatcha writing there, Coop?”

“Email.”

“What is it this time? ‘Have you ever really taken the time to study the structure of pinecones, Diane?’” Harry teases.

“No, that email was sent several days ago,” Dale says, completely missing the humor. He scrolls back to the top and reads. “Diane, following last night’s overtime loss to Dallas I can’t help but think that there needs to be a drastic overhaul in the NHL’s approach to games that extend beyond regulation time. While I also certainly don’t prefer the format present in playoff games either, it at least seems fairly logical in the sense that it’s structured very similarly to the initial three periods of play. A three-player group from each team on the ice feels unnecessarily hobbled and I’ve long held the notion that this is very largely responsible for the number of games that inevitably go to shootouts, which as Gordon has said many times is not, in fact, playing real hockey. I can’t help wholeheartedly agreeing with him on this matter. That issue aside, I continue to struggle with-”

Dale stops abruptly and very deliberately turns the laptop on his leg so that Harry can’t see the screen, his cheeks and ears turning pink.

“What is it, Coop?”

“Nothing you need to hear,” Dale says quickly, blushing even more.

Whatever it is Dale doesn’t want him to know about must really be something, and that makes Harry desperate to find out. He playfully makes a grab for the laptop but Dale snaps it shut immediately and holds it away from him.

“Coop.”

“No.”

“Tell me,” he demands through a grin.

“Absolutely not.”

“C’mon, it can’t be that bad!”

“It is that bad,” Dale insists in an embarrassed voice.

“I’ll get you scratched,” Harry jokes, not meaning it in any way.

“Harry, please drop the issue, it’s not funny and I don’t appreciate this.”

Okay, there’s not much he can say to that without being a total dick, so he does end up dropping it there and goes back to waiting in silence for them to bring him into the camera room again.

Bobby drops into a chair nearby. “Man, why do they have to do everyone at once?”

“Just to piss you off,” Harry says dismissively.

“Careful, cap, they’re making me talk about you in a few minutes. They’re gonna want me to say how great you are but I might not be able to help myself…”

“Bobby, I hope you’re aware that if you flub your take whether intentionally or not they’ll make you go through it again until you get it right,” Dale points out.

Thankfully, Bobby doesn’t try arguing with Dale like he sometimes does and instead slumps in his chair and looks bored in silence. Harry does get it - young players have this problem a lot, they’re not interested in PR stuff because they have no foresight about how it’ll help their careers in the long run, so he doesn’t really blame the twenty-year-old D-man for getting cranky and impatient. Bobby will grow out of it in a couple years, most guys do.

In total, it’s him, Dale, Bobby, Albert, and Hawk who will get filmed - Harry and Albert will be talking about Dale, then Dale, Bobby and Hawk will be talking about Harry. The You Can Play guys were beyond thrilled at the Kraken’s proposal for Pride Night, and Harry’s happy to help, but actually going through with it is kind of a pain in the ass. He doesn’t regret it but there’s other stuff he’d rather be doing with his time on a Thursday afternoon, like packing for their flight to Edmonton.

They have Harry come in first and he sits in front of the camera talking for seven or eight minutes… it’s not scripted, they just ask him to talk about Dale as a teammate, as an assistant captain, as a friend. So Harry reels off everything he can think of and the whole time knows that only three or four sentences will actually make it into the end product. He wonders which of his words will get picked and makes sure he pauses a little each time so they’ll have space to make a nice, clean cut in the film.

Harry comes back out again: “Albert, you’re up.” he jerks his thumb backwards over his shoulder towards the door.

Bobby keeps leaning over to try and see what Dale’s typing, and Dale looks increasingly annoyed every time he does that, so Harry purposefully sits between them and shoves Bobby over to stay in his own space. Dale turns his laptop slightly so that Harry can’t possibly see the screen and Harry wonders why the hell he didn’t just do that in the first place.

Then Bobby’s phone pings and as he looks at the text he breaks into a huge grin. “Hey cap, check this out!” He holds it over slightly so Harry can see. “Shelly said I can finally tell people, and she sent me this.”

“That an ultrasound?” Harry asks, frowning. He didn’t even know Bobby’s girlfriend was pregnant.

“Yeah. Apparently at her appointment today they said it’s a girl.”

“Congratulations… did you see any of these earlier?”

“Yeah, remember that optional skate I missed? I went with her for that one and we got to hear the heartbeat and everything.”

Harry decides not to say anything about how damn young those two are to be having a baby - his brother was twenty eight when Joey was born. It’s not really his business what his players do in their lives outside the NHL as long as no laws are getting broken and nobody’s getting hurt. He stops thinking about that altogether when it occurs to him again to wonder what the hell Dale’s so afraid of him finding out that’s on that computer - he’s never seen his friend blush before, and the whole thing is just weird. Maybe Harry will ask him again later when the guys aren’t around and get better answers.


	16. Color Schemes

The jerseys arrive while everyone’s at the practice arena and Harry gets called over by the equipment staff instead of going to the locker room to undress after. The boxes are all opened and he takes a look - a whole case of that rainbow pride tape, and then a mixed case of various solid-color tape rolls in case anyone wants to do their stick in the colors of one of the other pride flags instead. Harry’s gonna do that, actually - the handle of his stick will be done with the regular pride tape, but he’ll do the blade in pink, purple and blue because that’s specific to him.

The design of the jerseys was something of a hassle - originally they would all look the same, but then Albert of all people stepped in and demanded that they be more inclusive than just a generic rainbow-colored scheme. So Albert and Harry ended up deliberating with You Can Play and Reebok for several days about the design of these damn things before coming up with a solution. The torsos of the jerseys are white, the arms are six thick stripes in the scheme of the original pride flag. The nameplates and numbers are black, just so they’ll be easy to see. The logo on the chest can be in the colors of whichever flag the player wants. Harry’s is the same as how he plans to tape his stick blade.

Out of curiosity, he pokes through the box to see what everyone else picked for theirs. Albert’s is that weird “progress” flag, an amalgamation of a bunch of different pride flag designs and which Harry has seen in a few places before. A couple guys have the lesbian flag colors for their team crest, probably because they have gay women as relatives and Harry just hasn’t heard about it until now. There’s a three-striped one, pink and yellow and blue, that he can’t remember the name of. Dale’s is in the basic rainbow colors like the sleeves for obvious reasons. And most of the jerseys are like that, too, because a lot of Kraken players didn’t know any of the flag color schemes other than the rainbow one.

It’s a little bit funny - their Pride Night, January 2nd, is a game against the Blues, which is not a team known for being especially accepting of the queer community or really anyone who’s not a straight white male. The Blues, putting it bluntly, are assholes. They’re also one of those head-hunting teams like the Capitals and Harry’s worried about injuries to his guys for that game.

Harry heads to the locker room. “Hey, the warm-up jerseys for Pride night are in.”

And the whole team piles after him to go look for themselves. Thankfully it’s only been about two minutes since practice ended, so everyone’s still mostly in their gear and they can make sure these warm-up jerseys will fit over their shoulder pads and everything. Harry helps the equipment staff hand them out and soon the gear room is filled with the sound of plastic crinkling and being thrown around. Harry takes off his practice jersey and pulls the new one on, tugging it down over his shoulders and straightening out the bottom.

One of their PR guys is hanging around for exactly this reason and he takes video on his phone of them all trying on their Pride Night jerseys, then some still pictures of a few guys: Harry and Dale standing together with arms around each other’s shoulders, Albert looking grumpy despite actually being very pleased with himself over this, Mike with Bobby in a headlock because of course, a couple rookies pointing to each other’s chests (one has the lesbian-colored team crest and the other has that pink/yellow/blue one that Harry can’t place).

The jerseys are taken off again and returned to be folded up and put away until January 2nd, and the team herds back into the locker room to finish undressing. Harry dumps his pads into his bag and sits on the bench in his spandex for a few minutes stripping the tape off his stick, only from the one that got used. He knows some guys (especially Dale) like to retape all their sticks for every game and sometimes every practice even, but he’s not that picky and only screws with the tape on a stick that actually saw play.

“One of our final games this year,” Dale comments in the car when they’re finally on their way home. “Harry, I don’t have a good feeling about this one.”

Harry groans loudly. “Coop, you said that about our first game with the Bruins too! You gotta not say that anymore, you’re jinxing us!”

“But it’s the truth,” Dale insists. “And now, if we do win, you’ll feel even better about proving me wrong.”

“No I won’t, I don’t live my life looking for opportunities to say ‘I told you so,’ Dale.”

“In any case, I’ve said it now and can’t un-say it. We’ll simply have to deal with the consequences as they come.”


	17. Cooper On A Beach

Fort Myers Beach, Florida - not Harry’s favorite vacation spot, but still a nice place to go every so often. He wakes up in the guest room of Frank’s beach house with bruised ribs from getting crunched against the glass by a Bruin two days ago and a headache because he slept too long and now he’s dehydrated.

“Morning,” he says to Doris before sitting at the table next to Joey.

Normally, his nephew is all over him, but not now: Joey is eating pancakes with one hand and playing Toon Blast on his iPad with the other. Harry wouldn’t trust most kids with electronics around maple syrup, but Joey is way more careful with that iPad than he is with almost anything else. There isn’t a chance in hell that a single drop of syrup will ever touch that screen.

“You look like you got hurt,” Frank grunts, also sitting down.

“Yeah, a D-man the size of a logging truck reamed me into the glass,” Harry complains as he pours some syrup onto his own stack of pancakes.

“As much as you two get hurt I don’t think I want Joey playing professionally when he grows up,” Doris says.

“They’ll have better protective pads by then,” Frank says dismissively.

Harry glances over at Joey, who’s not even listening to anything they’re saying. He’s wearing a green shirt with the Kraken logo on it (much to Frank’s annoyance) that Harry got him as a birthday present two years ago… it’s not the original shirt, but Joey loved the first one so much that Harry bought the exact same shirt in every available size so that when he starts outgrowing one Doris can quietly switch it out during laundry. So far, Joey hasn’t noticed. Harry wonders how many meltdowns this will prevent in the future because his nephew loves that shirt and wears it as often as Doris lets him.

“Frank, how many pancakes have you eaten?”

“I don’t know. You never let me have enough pancakes, I need lots of calories.”

“He ate six pancakes, mommy,” Joey says without looking up from his screen.

Harry snorts. “You always tattle on your dad?”

“Yup.”

“Good boy.”

“Don’t encourage him.”

“What? I’m just his uncle, I get to be fun,” Harry grins indignantly.

“You lost to the Bruins again,” Frank says, very spitefully.

“That has nothing to do with this. Also, fuck you, they’re a hard team to play against.”

“I’ve beaten them twice already this season.”

“Yeah, but you also lost to me,” Harry points out before taking a huge bite of his breakfast.

“Frank, I want you to remember this conversation the next time you ask me why we don’t have more kids,” Doris frowns.

“Because my little brother’s a shit?”

“No, because the two of you _together_ are insufferable.”

“You’re just jealous because you never had a sister to fight with,” Frank jokes.

The rest of breakfast is spent bickering. After that, Harry takes Joey all one hundred feet to the beach so that Frank and Doris can first of all get the food ready for Christmas tomorrow and second of all have a break from Joey. The thing is, Joey can be pretty low-maintenance if you just sit nearby and let him do his stims. Like right now: he stands knee-deep in the water, repeatedly scrunching the sand with his toes. The biggest problem was getting the sunscreen on him because he hates to be touched but can’t reach his own back, so Harry promised him yet another Kraken jersey for his birthday to make up for it.

“So how’s hockey going?” Harry asks, sitting in the sand behind his nephew.

“Coach makes me play defense a lot. Dad said it’ll make me be a better player but now I don’t get to score goals as much.”

“Hey, y’know, one of my assistant captains is a D-man. And defense is real important, you’re helping out your goalie by stopping the other team from getting as close to the net. Trust me, goalies love D-men.”

“Yeah but you and dad are forwards.”

“Joey, you got a lotta years to go before you’re in the NHL. After you’ve done defense for a little bit, you probably will end up being a forward, and you’ll be a lot better than most other kids because you did this first,” Harry assures him.

Joey is still watching his own toes as he scrunches the sand with them. “Mommy doesn’t want me to play hockey.”

“Hey, your mom’s a worry-wart. If you like hockey, then you should play hockey.”

“One time, I was listening through the heating grate, and mommy said I can’t get in the NHL because of autism. There’s nobody there who has autism.”

“Okay, I know for a fact that there is, one’a my best friends has autism and he’s our top goal-scorer right now.”

“The new guy who gets in fights?”

“Yeah.”

“Why does he have autism?”

Harry chuckles. “Probably because he was born with it just like you were, ya goofball.”

“Uncle Harry when you buy me a jersey, I want you to make him sign it first.”

“Okay, I can do that.”

“And when mommy brings me to the game in February you should make him say hi to me.”

“Alright, I’ll ask him.”

“Dad says I have to wear a Lightning jersey instead for that game but I don’t wanna!”

“Okay, here’s what you do: wear the Kraken jersey, then put the Bolts jersey on top. That way your dad is fooled and you can just take off the Bolts jersey when you get there, and you can watch wearing a Kraken jersey instead.”

“Okay, I will!”

Watching Joey stim, Harry’s reminded of Dale’s comment about the laptop keyboard thing from however long ago. He doesn’t understand the mechanism of action that makes autistic people enjoy repetitive motions or specific textures, and he’s not convinced even _they_ know why they like it so much, but it makes his nephew and his friend happy so it makes him happy. If Dale was here right now, Harry has to wonder if he’d also be scrunching his toes in the wet sand, or if he’d be standing in the water at all. He knows Dale will only take showers and never baths, which is a little bit weird because whenever Harry’s extra-sore from a hockey injury there’s nothing he loves more than an entire bottle of Advil and a good hot soak in the tub. Maybe Dale would be sitting on the beach, nowhere near the water and typing another damn email to Diane on his laptop.

Or maybe they wouldn’t be on the beach at all. Maybe Dale would be stubborn enough to actually manage to open a coconut in Frank’s front yard (those fucking things are impossible to crack unless you have a crowbar and half an hour to waste). Or they’d be sitting inside with the AC on watching cartoons and eating pie. Dale loves cartoons. Maybe Harry would be able to coax Dale out to the beach and they’d just hang out for awhile. They should come to a beach sometime, maybe after the season ends and they’re done winning the Stanley Cup… they should come to a beach together just to hang out.


	18. Drop Dead

“I’m surprised you haven’t called your boyfriend yet,” Frank grins.

“Oh fuck off with that shit,” Harry grumps before tearing open his current present.

“Both of you stop, there’s a six-year-old sitting _right there,_ ” Doris barks.

“Yes, dear,” Frank says.

“Sorry,” Harry agrees.

“You should call him, he probably misses you.”

“Frank, I’m gonna kill you in your sleep,” he threatens.

“He’s gonna kill you in your sleep, dad,” Joey repeats from where he’s sitting next to the plastic tree.

“Har, I gotta know: how did you turn my own son against me?”

“Because I’m better than you in every way. And it’s not new, I’ve had him turned against you since he could talk,” Harry snickers. Then he looks down at what’s actually in his hands. “Oh, come on, Frank!”

It’s a royal blue sweatshirt with the logo of the Bolts on the chest.

“Yeah, well, you keep giving Joey Kraken shirts, now you know how it feels!”

“I’m gonna chop it up into rags and clean my truck with it.”

“I like the Kraken better,” Joey informs them from where he’s freeing a brand new pair of skates because apparently he outgrew the old ones again.

“That’s because you’re smart,” Harry tells him.

“These skates aren’t the same as my old skates.”

“Yeah, but those skates are better,” Frank says.

“But I like the old ones.”

Harry gets out of the chair and sits on the floor by his nephew. “You outgrew the old ones, bud. But y’know what, those are the exact same kinda skates I wear. These skates are way cooler than your old ones anyway.” Now Harry’s probably gonna end up sending a dozen pairs of this type of skates in increasing sizes to his brother just like with the shirt.

“You wear this kind of skate, Uncle Harry?”

“Yep. These are better than Bauer skates, Warrior gear is the only kind I ever get for myself.”

“Oh, okay!”

Thank god, a meltdown has been averted. Harry lets out a breath and without looking he knows Frank and Doris are doing the same thing. Harry picks up one of the skates and checks it carefully so he can make sure to buy the right ones. Of course they’re the most expensive version (not that he can’t afford it, but still).

“You need to wear that shirt so I can get a picture of you in it and plaster it all over the internet,” Frank demands.

“Drop dead, Frank.”

“Drop dead, dad,” Joey echoes.

Harry does his best not to laugh because in the back of his head he knows he shouldn’t actually encourage this behavior, so instead he scoops up the next box and shoves it into Joey’s waiting palms. “Here, open this.”

“Okay!”

Harry digs through the pile and finds one with Frank’s name on it - he twists around and throws it at his brother’s head. The nearest box after that is for him, so he opens it and finds a new pair of sneakers, which he vaguely remembers bitching about over the phone a month ago when his old ones got so worn out that they started giving him blisters. He holds one up to the bottom of his foot and it looks like it’ll fit just fine.

Randomly, he wonders if he should’ve bought Dale a Christmas present before they both flew out of Seattle to be with their families.

“You should probably call your boyfriend,” Frank says for the second time this morning.

Harry groans and doesn’t say anything, just sorts out the presents some more.

“Uncle Harry, do you really have a new boyfriend?” Joey asks.

“No, your dad’s making fun of me.”

“You have boyfriends sometimes.”

“Mm-hm. I have girlfriends sometimes, too.”

“How come you don’t have one right now?”

“Because I haven’t met anyone special in awhile. Someday I’ll have a new boyfriend or a new girlfriend, it just hasn’t happened yet.”

“Just date Cooper, Harry!”

“Frank, _shut up_!” he yells over his shoulder even though his brother is about four feet away from him.

“I’ve seen him talking about you on tv a couple times, I’m telling you Har, he has a thing for you.”

“No he doesn’t, knock it off.”

“I have _never_ had any of my teammates talk about me in interviews the same way as he gushes over you.”

“He doesn’t _gush,_ ” Harry protests in defense of his friend. “He just… talks funny. He has autism, too.”

“Yeah, you said. Doesn’t change the fact that he’s gushing in those interviews with your team’s reporter.”

“Frank-”

“Look, he probably feels too awkward about it or something, given the whole autism thing and also you outranking him, so you’ll have to make the first move and ask him out on a date-”

“Frank!” Harry bellows. “Enough!”

“You should bring him to that space needle you have up there.”

“I’m eating more candy,” Joey announces, interrupting them.

“No you’re not, you ate half your weight in chocolate already,” Doris scolds.

“But mommy I want more candy!”

“Finish opening your presents first. And you two, I already told you to stop shouting at each other at least five times since we got here.”

“Yes, dear.”

“Sorry, Doris.”

They do eventually get him into the damn Lightning sweatshirt for a picture - he’s on the couch wearing it with Joey sitting on his shoulders in an entire brand-new set of Warrior hockey pads, holding the stick in one bulky gloved hand and in the other a pair of tickets to the Panthers-Kraken game in February. He just knows it’s going to go up on Instagram or something and someone from his team will see it, and then he’ll be dragged by all the guys for a week over this damn sweatshirt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think Warrior also makes skates? Idk, all my stuff is CCM and I'm too lazy to look it up.


	19. Overload

Harry’s woken up by the door banging and then a series of loud thumps. He looks at the clock and groans - he’s only been asleep for about four and a half hours after flying in from Florida, and now he has to get up again to go see what all this noise is.

It’s Dale, back from Philadelphia and who apparently not only decided to just drop all his luggage on the kitchen floor in a pile but also that lying down and sleeping on the linoleum is an excellent idea. Harry sighs and nudges his friend with his foot. “Coop, get up.”

“Hm.” Dale doesn’t move or open his eyes.

“Coop.”

“Mm.”

“We have practice this afternoon, you need to lie down on the actual bed.”

“Yes,” Dale mumbles, which is the most movement he’s made so far.

“Dale, _get up._ ”

“Hm.”

Apparently he’s just so exhausted that he really couldn’t make it past the kitchen door. Harry gets to his level and strips him to his boxers, then pretty much drags him from the kitchen to the bedroom and actually has to lift all of his dead weight onto the bed. Dale’s already sleeping like a brick, so Harry wraps his friend in a blanket and then goes back to sleep himself after resetting the alarm for 11:30 in the morning.

Harry wakes up again with Dale snuggled against him from the side, both of them under the same blanket.

“Coop.”

Dale struggles fully into the real world, blinking heavily. “Yes, Harry.”

“What are you doing.”

“Oh.” Dale interrupts himself with a huge yawn. “You were shivering so strongly that the vibrations woke me up.”

Was he? He’s not cold now… although he did just come back to Washington state from Florida. Maybe he has the right to be cold even under a heap of blankets.

“Dale, you gotta stop trying to cuddle me. It’s weird.”

“I… alright. I’m sorry.”

Dale rolls away from him and Harry immediately starts to feel bad about it, which is confusing. He tries not to dwell on it and instead gets out of bed, which makes him immediately regret the fact that he slept in his underwear and a shirt. Is his house always this freezing? He grabs the first sweatshirt his hand lands on and goes into the kitchen to make coffee.

Dale wanders in wearing pants with no shirt and looking like he got punched in both eyes. “Harry, I don’t believe that shirt is appropriate.”

He looks down - it’s the damn Bolts sweatshirt. “Frank gave me this as a gag gift, I wasn’t really looking when I grabbed it. Oh, hey, I have a favor to ask: my nephew’s coming to see us play against the Panthers in a few weeks, he wants you to sign a jersey for him.”

“Alright, I will. Harry, is there enough coffee?”

“Yeah, why?”

“The pot isn’t at its usual volume.”

“Well… it’s not done filling up yet.”

“Oh, I see.”

Harry frowns. “Dale, I think you should be a healthy scratch from practice, you look like you need to go back to sleep for awhile.”

“No, I’ll be alright,” Dale insists.

“…if you say so, Coop.”

There’s only two more games this year - tomorrow will be against the Maple Leafs, and then on the 30th is an away game against the Flames. After that is New Years and then Pride Night against the Blues. Harry’s nervous about that game, but not because of the team they’ll be playing - no matter how small, there _will_ be some kind of backlash once he’s outed to the world, and he doesn’t want his teammates to suffer for it. Besides that, he’s also sure that sports journalism will have a field day with Dale admitting to being on the autism spectrum, and the idea of his friend being criticized for something so completely beyond his control fills Harry with rage.

They go to practice. Everything proceeds like normal except that in the locker room they’re mostly talking about how they spent Christmas with their families. Dale is unusually quiet, but that probably has a lot to do with him being exhausted. They go out and do drills, then comes a scrimmage. Dale’s way slower than usual and Harry really wishes he’d just gotten scratched and stayed home - he’s clumsy and awkward, not at all in good playing shape right now. And then he accidentally gets bowled over by a teammate. They all watch him drag himself up off the ice and immediately leave the arena altogether.

Harry gets worried. “Gordon, I’ll go talk to him, I’ll be back in a minute.”

Even being a practice arena, there’s still two locker rooms, and when Harry gets to the one they use Dale’s not there so he puts the blade-guards on his skates and walks all the way around to the other one. There’s noise coming from inside - a shower is running. Gloves, helmet, mouthguard, stick… they’re piled up on the empty bench, but nothing else is. Harry leaves his stick and gloves there, too, and slowly approaches the showers. Dale’s standing under the water in one, still in his pads and even the practice jersey and just by looking Harry can tell that the water is ice cold.

“Dale?”

The only response is a muted sob.

“I’m gonna bring over your gear bag and you can just stay here until we go home, okay? I’ll see if I can turn these lights down a little, too.”

“Thank you, Harry,” he whimpers.

Harry’s only seen this happen once before, and it was after their 6-1 loss to the Bruins in October. His best guess is that being so overwhelmingly tired has pushed Dale’s tolerance of sensory issues down to almost zero, so now he’s in overload and trying really hard not to have a meltdown in front of people because it’s embarrassing. The solution for this is to just leave Dale alone until it resolves itself. It’s kinda tough for Harry, all he wants to do is hug his friend really tight and say everything’ll be okay, but despite not minding it most of the time Dale gets touch-averse during these episodes and actually screamed at Harry for getting too close the first time in Boston.

So he flicks off half the lights in the visitor’s locker room, brings Dale’s gear bag, and goes back to practice. He doesn’t explain anything to anybody except Gordon because there’s no need and he doesn’t like the idea of talking about this without Dale around to participate.

Once they’re home again, Harry immediately sends Dale to bed, do not pass “Go” do not collect $200. He takes their stuff down into the basement and lays it all out like usual so the sweat can dry and everything will smell less bad. Once that’s all taken care of, he orders a pizza and eats the whole thing at once while scrolling through the team’s Twitter account on his laptop - the PR guy’s cell video and pictures of their pride jerseys have finally been posted. He watches the video with earbuds in.

_“Guys guys guys, we should sign these and then sell them on eBay, we’d make so much money,” Bobby said after fighting his way out of a headlock._

_“Don’t they pay you enough already?” Andy asked, genuinely concerned._

_“Yeah, but still.”_

_“Hey, nobody’s selling these, you guys are gonna keep them and frame them or something,” Harry ordered._

_“You’re no fun, cap!” Bobby complained._

_“I never said I was. Alright, let’s put ’em back, fellas. We’re not six-year-olds playing dress up, here.”_

Harry scrolls down a little further and finds the picture of him and Dale standing together… and then decides to read the comments.

 **bread_boy** omg harrys jersey is the bi pride flag!!!!!!! #krakenpride  
|  
**MadMax600**  
_replying to @bread_boy_  
I love him so much for this <3  
|  
**bucketlist**  
_replying to @bread_boy_  
I think we need to take a step back & remember that just wearing a shirt isn’t being a good ally. you can wear whatever shirt you want & say pretty words but at the end of the day only you’re actions count.  
|  
**bucketlist**  
_replying to @bread_boy_  
we don’t know any of these players aren’t just doing it for brownie points. probably most of them don’t even know what these flags stand for.  
|  
**bucketlist**  
_replying to @bread_boy_  
I’m willing to bet most of the kraken & most nhl players to begin with only do this b/c there PR teams told them its a good idea, after all theirs only like 10 openly gay players in the entire nhl.  
|  
**alien-conspiracy**  
_replying to @bread_boy_  
@bucketlist you never know, dude. Maybe some of them will come out.  
|  
**bucketlist**  
_replying to @bread_boy_ _  
_ @alien-conspiracy yes maybe some of them will but they probably won’t, let’s be real here.

 **RandomWhiteBoy** thank you @nhl-kraken for this these jerseys are dope as hell #krakenpride  
|  
**nhl-kraken**  
_replying to @RandomWhiteBoy_  
Thank you! They are now available for sale at [shop.nhl.com](https://shop.nhl.com/seattle-kraken/t-10432444+z-9484955-1432709151?ab=%7Bwt-static_graphic%7D%7Bpt-HP%7D%7Bal-Above_spot%7D%7Bct-Seattle_Kraken%7D%7BHome_Page%7D) for a limited time!

 **krakengetcrackin’** idk if i like these they make the boys look like fruit stripe gum

 **Y205G** hey @nhl-kraken who are u playing on pride nite  
|  
**nhl-kraken**  
_replying to @Y205G_  
Hi, we’re playing the St. Louis Blues on January 2nd!

 **chaos_craig** Those jerseys look like candy… I want to eat one lol

 **metro-rivs-hockey-girl** IS NOBODY ELSE GOING TO TALK ABT HOW HARRY’S JERSEY HAS THE BI PRIDE FLAG ON IT #krakenpride  
|  
**bread_boy**  
_replying to @metro-rivs-hockey-girl_  
i did! ^_^  
|  
**goopgoopgone**  
_replying to @metro-rivs-hockey-girl_  
Albert has the progress flag on his, you can see it for like 2s in the vid  
|  
**metro-rivs-hockey-girl** **  
** _replying to @metro-rivs-hockey-girl_  
@goopgoopgone OMG YOU’RE RIGHT HE DOES GOSH I LOVE THIS TEAM! #krakenpride  
|  
**bread_boy**  
_replying to @metro-rivs-hockey-girl_  
i mean look at harrys epic bromance with coop the kraken is the gayest team in the nhl!  
|  
**goopgoopgone**  
_replying to @metro-rivs-hockey-girl_  
@bread_boy they are so cute in their interviews talking abt each other, you can’t tell me they’re not secretly in love #trooper

Harry rolls his eyes at that last one and closes out of Twitter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Meltdowns still happen for adults, it's very hard to grow out of them and they fucking suck. Autism is not pretty and this does come up again for Cooper way later in the fic.


	20. Pride Night

Since it’s a special night for the team, the pregame doesn’t happen like it usually does. The Blues aren’t even on the ice for warm-ups yet, but the Kraken are all present, standing in a row on the center line in their pride jerseys. Glancing around, even not being that close to any part of the glass Harry can see that a lot of fans, almost a full sixth of them, are wearing the replica pride jerseys for sale on the NHL’s online store. Those who aren’t have on regular jerseys, or rainbow shirts, or are actually waving around assorted pride flags from their seats. He can count, from where he’s standing, exactly three rival fans in Blues jerseys. It’s incredible.

In the middle of the line is their head coach, who’s wearing a blue-pink-white striped tie with his suit tonight because it looks like the trans flag. Harry is hyper-aware of the colors on his jersey’s team crest and his stick tape right now - the moment of truth is fast approaching.

The announcer goes through the usual speech about the You Can Play initiative and Hockey Is For Everyone. And then the first video starts showing on the jumbotron. Their rookies are shown, the fourth-line guys, a few of their most common AHL callups. Each of them says a version of the same thing: I support the LGBT+ community. Gradually, it gets to their more popular and well-known players.

_“My name is Albert Rosenfield, I’m starting goaltender for the Seattle Kraken. One of my best friends is gay, and he plays for this team.”_

_“I’m Bobby Briggs, I’m second-pair defense for the Seattle Kraken, and I’ll back up my teammates no matter what.”_

_“I’m Tommy ‘Hawk’ Hill, I’m first-line left wing for the Seattle Kraken. Some of my closest friends and favorite teammates are LGBT.”_

_“I’m Andy Brennan, I play first-pair defense for the Seattle Kraken, and I love the whole team for who they are.”_

_“I’m Dale Cooper, I’m first-line right wing and an assistant captain for the Seattle Kraken. I would like everyone to know that I am gay and on the autism spectrum.”_

_“I’m Gordon Cole. I’m the head coach for the Seattle Kraken, and I have every reason to believe that I have the best team in the NHL.”_

And finally: _“I’m Harry Truman. I’ve been first-line center and team captain of the Seattle Kraken for seven years and counting. I’m part of the queer community. And I want everyone out there to know that hockey is for everyone.”_

His heart is beating against his ribs so hard he starts to worry that it’ll explode. The waves of cheers erupt all around the stadium, the fans are on their feet screaming and waving all their flags. Harry feels Dale’s glove rest on his shoulder pad and he breathes again. Life is okay.

The next video is the one talking about Dale.

_“Originally drafted by the Philadelphia Flyers and then playing with them for nine seasons, right wing Dale Cooper is known by opponents for two things: being a frighteningly good shot against almost any goaltender, and consistently getting into brawls on the ice,” the narrator’s voice played over stock footage of Dale scoring on a wrist shot while he was still with the Flyers. “Like most hockey players, though, he’s known by his teammates for so much more.”_

_Albert was shown in the interview chair. “We were teammates for almost all of his hockey career. I suffered through one season on the roster of the Capitals and he was worried we’d stop being friends after that, because on the ice there’s no stopping him sometimes. But he’s a great person just to be on the same team with, he’s always happy, he always smiles. Sometimes he even makes me feel a little less cranky.”_

_And then Harry. “When I first met him, I was real surprised, he’s the only guy who gets to the locker room before I do. Until then I was always there first. And it’s not just that, there’s all kinds’a stuff I didn’t really expect from him. I never knew much about him until he got traded to us, just that I hated facing him on the ice like so many guys. But Coop’s not ‘so many guys,’ he’s an amazing player, he’s an amazing teammate, he’s already one of my best friends off the ice. You wanna hang onto a guy like that as long as you can, I already can’t imagine the team without him. I hope we keep him forever.”_

_The video cut to more stock footage of Dale skating, this time in Kraken colors and with more of the narrator’s voice. “But Cooper faced some unique challenges getting into the NHL.”_

_Albert again. “I think I’m the first guy he ever told about having autism… he was a rookie back then, and I wasn’t even the starting goalie yet. I don’t remember being very surprised by that, I think I thought that it explained a lot of things about him.”_

_Harry again. “Well, my brother’s son has autism. So I know more about this than probably most of the other guys on the team. I don’t really notice most’a the time, though, he’s my teammate, and I look out for all the guys just like with him. But there was this one time.” He started to chuckle. “He actually came out to us all at once, I think Bobby was making some comment or whatever and Coop was just like ‘yeah I’m gay,’ or something like that. So I actually pulled him aside later on and I told him something to the effect that he needed to save conversations like that for when we weren’t in the middle of a game. But usually he knows where the line is, he doesn’t really need help all that much. And he’s a smart guy, he can usually figure out a situation for himself.”_

_Finally it showed Dale. “It was more difficult to explain to my teammates that I’m on the spectrum than to come out to them as gay. As far as we’re aware, there are no other players who are also autistic. It seems possible they exist and simply haven’t come forward, but at the current moment, I’m the only one we’re aware of. It’s slightly concerning at times… but I’m part of an incredible team. They’re highly understanding, they accept this difference as another component of my skills as a team member. If I wasn’t autistic, I would have a drastically different play style on the ice. It’s very likely I wouldn’t have been good enough to be part of the NHL to begin with if I was neurotypical. I… was asked, once, on my previous team, if theoretically a cure existed, would I take it. And I said no. It’s shaped too many things in my life and in general I’m not actively aware of its presence. To remove it would be more closely related to amputating a limb than curing a disease.”_

And the next video begins… Harry swallows way too hard as footage of him as a rookie pops up.

_“Center Harry Truman was a fourth-round draft pick by the Columbus Blue Jackets and was called up early in his first AHL season to fill in for an injury. Including his rookie year, he was with Columbus for five seasons, quickly earning a place on the second line and staying there. At twenty three years old he was traded to the Montreal Canadiens in exchange for a first round draft pick, where he played for one season before ultimately coming to the Seattle Kraken and being named an assistant captain.”_

_Hawk appeared on the screen. “I’ve been on this team since I was drafted, and when Harry got here he was already a leader. I think everybody knew that once Dwayne retired, Harry would be captain. And that’s pretty much how it happened. We went from a forty-four-year-old guy to a twenty-six-year-old guy and the difference was night and day.”_

_And then Bobby. “So I got drafted by the Kraken, man. I didn’t get called until the end of my first season, I kind of figured hey, I’ll be here for a couple games. I heard on other teams sometimes the captain or the veteran players don’t really take callups that seriously, but it’s not like that here. I don’t think I’ll ever forget this, but when I first got here, to the NHL, he actually came over to me and he said ‘if you ever have any problems, you come to me first, and I’ll help you get everything sorted out.’ And he does that for everybody. He says that to everyone the first time they show up. And I’m kind of a pain in his_ **_BLEEP_ ** _sometimes, y’know, but he still talks to me the same as he talks to Big Ed or Hawk. He’s really tough on that rule, the rookies and the veterans are all equal here.”_

_Some behind-the-scenes media footage of him lecturing a locker room during an intermission, but it was muted so the narrator could still talk. “The general consensus among the Kraken is that their captain loves everyone on the team.”_

_And now it was Dale’s turn to monologue into the camera. “He’s extremely respectful to everyone, even when he’s unhappy with something they’ve done. I’m strongly under the impression that he’s able to maintain this level of respect because of an understanding that it goes in both directions: the team respects him, and so he respects them as well. He has a good relationship with each of his players, and he’s very competent at reading and understanding the needs of everyone around him. When I first arrived shortly prior to the beginning of the current season, I explained to him that I have autism and that I have sensory issues at times, and his exact words to me on the subject were ‘I can live with that.’ There was an immediate level of understanding and acceptance that I had never encountered before… when I was on the Flyers and finally told my captain, he was very concerned about it and asked me a number of uncomfortable questions. Harry has never done that. I’ve never felt uncomfortable or ostracized on this team, and I strongly believe that a large part of that is a direct result of the culture that he works so hard to foster.”_

_Finally, Harry himself. “I was… real nervous about coming out to my team. It’s not something I ever did before and back when I was a rookie there was only one player in the entire league who was openly gay. So mostly it was still kinda this - theoretical thing. Like the guys once in awhile would sit around speculating about ‘is this-and-such player on this-and-such team secretly gay?’ And that kinda stuff. And I sat there feeling all nervous and never said anything. And it’s kinda harder in a way, because a lotta people think being bisexual is just being indecisive, and you should make up your mind and either be gay or not. Or you get accused of being pro-the gender binary and that kinda crap_ _and lemme tell you, none’a that is good for your self-image. And the way I understand it is there’s a lot more guys on our teams than we know about who aren’t straight. But they’re still afraid to come forward. I’m on a team I love and that I know loves me and I was_ still _afraid to come forward. But at the end of the day it went alright for me. My team and my coach support me. I know that the NHL as a whole really kinda needs to keep working at this, to make it normal for its players and its staff to be something other than straight people. So I feel lucky that my team’s already there. We’re at this point, now, that it’s normal for us. Someday all the other teams will get there, too, but I’m glad right now that it turned out to be mine. I’m a lucky guy. I love my team. I’d never pick anyplace else to be.”_

And the whole stadium of fans is out of their seats again, screaming and stamping their feet. The team breaks up from its perfect line and all of them take turns hugging Harry and Dale both, which when Harry glances up is apparently being zoomed in on by the arena cameras and being broadcast on the screens over center ice (and undoubtedly on tv, too). Finally they hug each other and Harry can practically hear all the tv viewers at home whipping out their phones to tweet uncontrollably about his and Dale’s “bromance” some more.

After the horrifying ordeal of finally being outed to the world, the game against the Blues is barely even a daunting task. Between warm-ups and the start of the 1st, Harry very specifically (and half-jokingly) asks that Albert get them a shutout, because the Blues’ track record with gay rights has been worse than most other teams’, which is saying a _lot._ He then also jokingly says that if Dale doesn’t get a hat-trick for the same reason, then he’ll be sleeping on the couch tonight. The whole locker room laughs.

The ridiculous thing is that the team actually does make this happen. By the end of the 2nd Dale _does_ have a god damn hat-trick (of course he does), on top of two fighting majors, both against the same D-man. Harry gets primary assists on two of those goals and also scores one for himself unassisted on a breakaway, which is something that never happens for him normally. Mike scores a goal almost by accident late in the 3rd and Albert, being Albert, doesn’t let a single shot hit the back of his net. The Kraken wins 5-0.

On the drive home: “Coop, you’re something else.”

“Oh?”

“I told you to get a hat-trick and you just went out and did it. I wasn’t even being serious.”

“Well, Harry, I’ve always taken you seriously,” Dale smiles.

God, what a smile, too… nobody anywhere smiles like Dale. It’s more infectious than the flu and Harry can’t help doing it back.

“Okay, well I have another request for you if you’re up to it.”

“Yes, feel free.”

“If I give you a jersey, will you take it to the All-Star Weekend with you and get it signed by everyone? It’s for my nephew.”

“Consider it done,” he promises.

“Thanks, Dale.”

Harry could almost kiss him. He’s such a great friend.


	21. Issues

After the nerve-wracking but ultimately successful event of Pride Night, Harry settles into a comfortable state around his team’s schedule and it’s not hurt at all by the fact that most of the time, they win. They’re number one in the entire Western Conference by the time the All-Star Weekend rolls around, the symbolic halfway point in the season. Dale is the only Kraken player who’s going, which isn’t surprising at all because he’s rarely ever _not_ selected for the ASG.

The morning before Dale leaves, Harry wakes up being cuddled by his friend. This has stopped being so unusual because Harry’s stopped being afraid of getting caught, so he’s been letting Dale do this because there’s really no harm to it in the end. It makes his friend happy, and if Dale is happy then Harry’s happy, too. (And besides even that, it’s been at least two and a half years since he was last seeing anybody, and cuddles are nice. He missed getting cuddled and barely even realized it until now.)

Harry hits the button on the alarm clock and pushes against Dale’s shoulder. “Get up, Coop.”

Dale whines. “But you’re warm.”

He chuckles. “Come on, if you don’t go they’ll punish you.”

“Ten more minutes.”

Harry snorts. “You said that ten minutes ago when I hit the snooze button. Come on, let’s go make some coffee.”

Dale shakes his head and nestles even closer. “Harry, the temperature outside the blankets is unpleasant and I also strongly desire to someday _not_ be called up for the All-Star Weekend. It always ends up being me who’s chosen and I resent that.”

“Suck it up, buttercup. C’mon, coffee.”

If he says coffee enough times it usually gets Dale out of bed, and today is no exception. Harry starts the machine and then gets to work scrambling some eggs, and while that’s happening he also makes toast. Dale just sits bleary-eyed at the table, watching.

“If you get back from this in the same kinda dead-on-your-feet way as after Christmas, I’m gonna just have you be a healthy scratch,” Harry warns him.

“Yes, that may be a good choice,” Dale nods.

Harry sets plates of food and mugs of coffee on the table and they both eat without saying much. When his plate is empty he gets up to refill his coffee cup, and then Dale is in his space and for a really weird second they stare at each other and don’t move. Randomly Harry realizes he would only have to lean over about five inches and then he could kiss Dale if he wanted to - he has no idea where the hell that thought comes from. Eventually he notices that Dale is also holding an empty mug. He pours them both refills and the situation gets back to normal again. Dale just wanted coffee. That’s all.

Except that’s not all. Thinking about it, Dale seemed like he was looking for something else, something that Harry didn’t give him. Harry turns around to ask, but Dale’s on the living room couch now, sipping from his mug occasionally while typing probably an email to Diane on his laptop. Harry sits back down and thinks. Dale almost looked like he wanted to say something, but he didn’t. Harry will have to ask him about it in case he needs something important.

For now, though, he drinks his coffee and reads the news on his own laptop for a few minutes, and when he looks up again Dale is somewhere else - after a second Harry catches the sound of the shower running. But the laptop is there, sitting on the couch… open. Maybe he can blame this on the coffee not having kicked in yet, but Harry for once decides to be a nosy bastard and goes over to see what’s on there.

First is an unfinished draft email which hasn’t been sent yet.

_Diane, I would first like to say that from an outside perspective it may seem like this is the simplest and most logical answer. However I can assure you it’s quite the opposite. The situation, as I’ve said many times now, is unprecedented and to some extent downright embarrassing. I believed I had more control over my emotions than this and it continues to irritate me that I was mistaken._

Harry’s not sure he gets what Dale’s going on about, so he scrolls up for context.

 _Coop, you need to say something. That’s all there is to it. There’s nothing else you can do because this problem CLEARLY isn’t going to fix itself and to be brutally honest I’m tired of listening to you bitch and moan about it without actually trying to address anything. You’re a twenty seven year old assistant captain and you should be able to handle it on your own by now, but every time - EVERY TIME - I open an email from you these days it’s you going back and forth like on a pendulum about what you should do. Oh, but he’s a teammate and it’s inappropriate! Oh, but he should at least know the truth! FUCKING PICK ONE ALREADY. Either say nothing or go through with it. That’s it. That’s all there is. And for the dozenth time now, I really think you should just talk to him._ _  
_ _-Diane_

Instead of digging his own grave even more (Harry already feels guilty about this enough as it is), he scrolls all the way back down to the bottom and leaves Dale’s laptop in its spot on the couch. This was actually really unhelpful because now he’s just more confused - he didn’t even know Dale was having problems with somebody on the team. There’s been no signs of conflict at all that Harry’s noticed… he’ll have to talk to Dale about this.

Dale comes out of the bathroom in pants and a flannel and pours himself a third mug of coffee. “I looked at the roster when it was announced. None of my friends will be present.”

Harry immediately interprets this as _I will be lonely for three days._

“You can call if you want.”

“Thank you, it’s very likely I will. Several times.”

“Hey Dale, you’re not… having issues with anybody on the team, are you?”

Dale looks really confused. “Of course not, why?”

“You kinda were looking at me funny earlier, I thought you needed to talk about something.”

“Oh. Harry, I can assure you I’m getting along perfectly fine with everyone on the team.”

“Okay. Uh. Good.”

He watches as Dale goes and sits with the laptop again, thankfully not somehow noticing that Harry was snooping around on it. He types rapidly for several minutes, then stares at the screen and sighs before doing something with the touchpad (probably actually hitting “send” on the email) and then snapping it shut so it can be packed in his luggage.

“I have the jersey you want me to get signed for your nephew,” Dale promises as he stacks both suitcases near the kitchen door.

“Great, thanks so much for doing that. He’s gonna be real happy when I send it to him.”

Dale puts on his shoes and Harry gets up to hug him before he leaves. And even this - Harry can just _feel_ that something’s off, his friend’s posture is just slightly changed. Dale hugs back like he never wants to let go. Maybe he’s scared for some reason.

“Coop, what is it?” Harry asks, pulling away and putting both hands on Dale’s shoulders. “I know something’s wrong, I want you to tell me.”

“I…” Dale looks away from him, towards the wall.

“C’mon, you know you can tell me anything. Anything at all.”

Dale shakes his head. “I have insufficient time to delve into this topic right now. Ask me again once I’m back, and I promise I’ll explain.”

“You sound like you feel guilty about something.”

“In a sense, that’s true. It’s very complicated. Harry, I don’t have time, I’m sorry.”

Harry sighs and nods. “Alright.” He hugs Dale again. “Good luck, Coop.”

“Thank you.” And he goes to catch his flight.


	22. Unexplainable

Eventually the guilt and the uncertainty are too much for Harry. So the day before Dale comes back, he asks Albert to meet up with him so they can talk.

His reasoning for this is twofold. First, Albert is Dale’s other best friend and probably already knows what’s going on. And second, while Albert’s not technically one of the team’s leaders he is still old enough and smart enough to be objective and thoughtful. Harry will put up with his crankiness in exchange for these boons.

“There’s only one meal on this menu that’s vegan,” Albert complains, glaring at the laminated page.

“Sorry. I picked this place because they have great burgers, I wasn’t even thinking about that.”

“Why exactly are you dragging me out to lunch on my day off?”

“Albert… before I say anything else, please hold yourself back from calling me any variation of ‘dumb bastard’ until I’m done explaining,” Harry says, which gets an eyebrow raised at him. “I think Coop’s having an issue with somebody, but when I asked him he wouldn’t tell me anything and then he had to leave for his flight. But I didn’t even know anything was wrong until I saw an email he was writing… don’t look at me like that, the coffee hadn’t sunk in yet and I wasn’t thinking very well. I already feel bad about it. But Diane apparently has been going back and forth with him on this for months, now. It’s not a new thing. I figured you probably know what’s up with Coop because he talks to you, if he’s having problems I feel like I should know.”

Albert shakes his head, then rubs his forehead, then sighs heavily. “You dumb bastard.”

“Yeah.” He knew that was coming.

“Harry, I think my first complaint isn’t even the fact that you were digging around on his laptop even though you already knew you shouldn’t have been doing it. Instead my first complaint is that _you’re too smart to be this dumb._ Normally I’d say something to the effect of ‘if you’d just sit and think about it you’d figure it out,’ but by now I think we both know that’s just not true.”

“Thanks for that. Now would you mind telling me what the hell’s going on, here?”

The waiter comes to take their orders, interrupting them for a minute. Once he’s gone, Albert finally answers.

“Okay. Imagine you’re Cooper.”

“Okay…?”

“Just trust me. Imagine you’re him for a second. You’re not always necessarily able to express yourself well when it comes to emotions and for that matter you don’t always _understand_ your own emotions to begin with. Now imagine that you have a huge, unmanageable crush on one of your teammates. There’s nothing you can do about it except suffer through it and try to hide it because you’re smart enough to realize that it would be inappropriate and disruptive for team chemistry if you ever came clean about the object of your affections. Do you still follow me or should I write this down for you?”

“Yeah, keep going.”

Albert nods and takes a breath, looking really uncomfortable for once. “And now… imagine this person is your team captain.”

Oh, god.

“Albert, that’s not funny,” Harry croaks, suddenly with the driest mouth he’s ever had.

“I’m not joking.”

This is possibly one of the worst things Harry’s ever heard. He hugs Dale and lets Dale snuggle up to him and they sleep in the same bed and Harry never made Dale try to find a new apartment and he put Dale in his own hockey pads once… he’s been leading his best friend around by the dick and didn’t even know it.

Harry feels sick.

“Well… now what?”

“That’s up to you,” Albert shrugs. “The two of you could act like fucking adults and try talking about this, or you could just be a bastard and keep quiet. Honestly I don’t even get how you didn’t notice this on your own, it’s all the team talks about while the two of you are out of the room.”

“Please, keep telling me things that’ll make me feel worse,” Harry snaps.

“I’m not trying to make you feel worse, I’m just being honest,” Albert spits back. “And speaking of honesty, I also think that you need to have a good hard think about this and how you actually feel about Cooper, because you’ve done a lot of things so far that can’t really be explained as ‘oh they’re good friends.’ I know he sleeps on the other side of your bed. That’s not normal.”

And somehow that never occurred to him, either. He never questioned the idea of Dale sleeping next to him. Harry sits in silence for awhile, processing everything. In fact their food arrives before he can think of anything to reply with.

“There’s so much I don’t understand about this.”

“Such as?”

“Usually he tells me every thought that crosses his mind, it never occurred to me there was anything he wouldn’t say.”

“Yeah, well, there’s a reason for that.”

“What reason?”

Albert shakes his head and makes a face at his food. “This has happened before and he got burned by a teammate. That was the last straw that made him ask to get traded. The best way I ever heard autism described was that it’s like programming a computer. When you write those programs, you set specific parameters for things. So for somebody like Cooper, the way the world reacts to the things he does is what sets those parameters. Unless there’s an outside influence, he’s always going to believe now that that’s what’s going to happen if he comes forward with these feelings. Computers can’t change their programming without help.”

“Yeah but you brought up a good point before. Even if I did have a thing for him - which I’m not saying I do, because at this point I don’t know a god damn thing - even if I did, it would be really inappropriate. We’re teammates and I outrank him. And what if we were fighting with each other? It could lose us entire games.”

Albert shrugs. “If it ever did turn out you two were seeing each other I guarantee nobody on the team or even any of the staff would be the least bit surprised at this point.”

Harry picks up a french fry and then puts it back on his plate. “My brother wouldn’t be, either,” he admits.

“Well let me ask you this, have you ever at any point thought about kissing him?”

“What? I don’t know.”

“But I bet you are now that I said it. And how does that image in your head feel to you?” Actually now that Albert’s mentioned it that seems like a pretty good idea… Harry doesn’t say anything and Albert rolls his eyes. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Like I said, absolutely no one will be surprised to hear about this.”


	23. Loneliness

Harry waits until Dale’s all settled again before he even thinks about talking. The suitcases are unpacked and Dale’s gear is spread around in the basement to air out, and then Harry warms up some stew for him as a late supper. Only now does Harry start to think about talking.

“Coop, uh… look, I did something a couple days ago that you’re probably gonna be mad about,” he starts, mostly because he still feels _really_ guilty about it.

“I doubt there’s much you could do which would make me get terribly upset with you, Harry,” Dale argues from the table.

Harry sets a bowl and a spoon in front of him and also sits.

“Look, I had… just had my coffee and it hadn’t sank in yet, so I wasn’t really making my best decisions at the time. So. Um. You left your laptop open on the couch and I read some’a your emails.”

Dale is so still he could put a statue to shame for a moment. “How much did you read?” he demands eventually.

“Not that much. Diane getting fed up with you over something.”

“Yes, I see. And what exactly possessed you to do this in the first place?”

Yeah, Dale’s pissed. Harry swallows hard.

“I was just curious I guess. Look I didn’t see that much, and I feel real bad about it.”

“I think you should feel bad about it,” Dale yells. “If I wanted you to know what I was writing I would’ve read it to you myself.”

“Coop-”

The hand goes up, but Dale doesn’t say anything for a minute. He doesn’t eat, he doesn’t talk. He just stares down at the table and breathes. Eventually he stands from the chair.

“I’m taking a shower.”

And he leaves.

Harry stays where he is for awhile, thinking very carefully about what went wrong here. Well, he shouldn’t have been snooping around in Dale’s emails for fucking starters. And if he hadn’t they wouldn’t even be in this situation at all. Right now, Harry has to wonder how many brain cells he’s actually lost to concussions over his career in the NHL, because it seems like a lot more than he maybe realized before. Eventually Harry gets up from the table and pulls on his puffy winter coat to go outside and sit in his truck. This way Dale can have some space even once he’s out of the shower. He turns the engine so that it can run and give him heat and then settles into the seat and thinks some more.

What, exactly, is he even trying to accomplish here? His goal sure as hell wasn’t to make Dale mad, but that’s about all he’s achieved tonight. It’s like Pandora’s Box or some shit, though. Harry can’t un-learn anything that Albert told him yesterday and now that he knows it _has_ to get addressed, and sooner rather than later. And Harry doesn’t even know how he feels about this whole thing, it’s way too complicated and the idea that he might possibly also have some kind of feelings back is so scary he can’t even think about it. What the hell is he gonna do?

The inside of his truck gets warm and Harry rubs his face. It’s ten at night and they have practice tomorrow… this probably should’ve waited. But waited until when? They always have a practice or a game or something going on. How long can you wait for a thing like this? It’s impossible. There is no good time to talk about something so big and problematic.

Harry watches the snowflakes hit his windshield and immediately melt into tiny beads of water. This is what you get when you do something stupid and betray your friends’ trust, and he understands that. Dale has every right to be unhappy with him for this. But that’s not the issue at hand, or at least not the main one. Harry didn’t even get close to talking about any of the things he discussed with Albert yesterday. Now Dale won’t want to hear it. Is the situation even fixable? And how would they talk about it anyway when Harry doesn’t have a full grasp on the problem?

He needs to confront the Big Scary Thing and figure this out.

Slowly, Harry makes a mental inventory, trying to draw everything together. He compares the living arrangements he has with Dale to what he had in his most recent relationship and the two things are almost identical except that they’ve never kissed or had sex. Harry’s even been trying to teach Dale how to make pancakes out of a box sometimes. And he realizes, finally, that he’s stopped being lonely and stopped wishing he had a new relationship because all the slots a relationship would take up are already filled by his friend. If Dale decided to actually find a new apartment finally, Harry would go back to being lonely in his empty house - and that thought is unbearable.


	24. Albert's Miracles

The Washington Capitals - one of Harry’s least favorite teams to face besides the Bruins. These fuckers are deliberate head-hunters as much as they are skill players, which means they’ll be dancing in circles around you while also breaking your face on their knuckles.

This is shaping up to not be a good night. For one thing, Dale is still barely even on speaking terms with Harry right now, which means that yesterday’s practice was nothing less than a god damn nightmare and also that Harry has been sleeping on the couch and has a crick in his neck that won’t go away. He doesn’t have very many reasons to believe they can win this one aside from the fact that Albert is a level and a half above most goalies.

Right from the get-go, this game is messy. Harry loses the faceoff and is body-checked backwards at least three feet before landing on the ice and he looks up just in time to see Andy take a stick to the face - the whistle blows and he frantically makes for the bench with blood pouring out of his nose.

“ _Washington number ninety five, four minutes, high-sticking,_ ” comes the voice of the ref over the speakers.

Ten seconds in and they have a power play… too bad that for one thing they suck at power plays to begin with and for another thing Harry and Dale have a disconnect right now. He takes the faceoff and passes to Hawk, and the five of them are cycling through like usual but there’s no good shooting lanes opening up. Harry tries to get one off but it goes into the glove, no rebound. Their first power play unit takes the ice and he heads back to the bench so he can drink some Gatorade and watch his team fail to score on the man-advantage.

The 1st is pretty much both teams trading penalties - Harry gets a fighting major at about the halfway point for throwing hands against Hank, Hawk gets one for slashing towards the end. Nobody’s scored yet when they head for their locker rooms.

“Did you fellas all have bags of cement for dinner?” Gordon demands at the center of the room. “Or did you decide that yesterday’s clusterfuck of a practice would be a good idea to repeat? Mike, why haven’t you been supporting Bobby, and while you’re at it why haven’t the both of you been covering Albert? Harry, you shouldn’t be in the box so much. Leave your personal problems at home instead of getting into it with Hank Jennings, he’s not worth your time or energy. Coop, what the hell’s gotten into you? You’re playing like you broke both feet and an arm overnight. Andy, stop getting hurt. Ed, try to stop Andy from getting hurt. This period was terrible and we need to step it up. Albert, I’m sorry you have to put up with them, you’re the only one doing your job tonight.”

The 2nd ends up being pretty similar no matter how much Gordon yells and lectures them on the bench. Harry gets into a brawl with a Caps D-man and is sent for his third fighting major of the night. Dale is playing like a zombie. It’s Andy who finally scores for them, cotton balls stuffed up his nose and all. When they go for the intermission, Gordon is livid that only three or four players seem to be actually interested in doing their jobs tonight. Albert is equally angry with them and also takes a turn yelling that he’s been pretty much completely unprotected in the net for forty minutes of gameplay and has had to surpass every Olympic gymnast ever in order to keep the Caps’ score at zero.

The 3rd - Hank tries to pick a fight with Dale, so Harry picks a fight with Hank and ends up in the box again - he has twenty PIM tonight, and that’s going to hurt his stats a little, but he doesn’t give a shit. It’s all he knows how to do right now, he can’t score goals or get assists or even win faceoffs so he might as well ditch his gloves and introduce his knuckles to the face of any nearby opponent. By some miracle, Albert keeps them afloat, and the game ends with a 1-0 score despite the Kraken giving an absolutely bottom of the barrel performance tonight. And then they all immediately grab their bags and get on the plane for tomorrow night’s game in Pittsburgh.

Harry plugs his earbuds into his phone so he can listen to music and take a nap during the flight, but before he can even put them into his head Albert drops into the seat next to him with a very unhappy expression on his face.

“What did you do?” he demands.

“Albert-”

“Dammit, Harry, _what did you do?_ I’m sure your toddler-level observational skills didn’t pick up on this, but Coop looked like he was about to cry all through practice yesterday and he obviously didn’t sleep at all last night. So I’ll say it again: what. Did. You. Do.”

“Nothing,” Harry insists. “I tried to come clean about the email thing and he just blew up at me and wouldn’t talk to me for the rest of the night. He didn’t even give me a chance to explain myself, he just stormed out of the kitchen without even eating his dinner.”

“Well, why did you start with that of all things?”

“Because I felt bad about it,” Harry growls. “Y’know what, I wish I never touched his fucking laptop to begin with, I don’t need this. Ignorance really is bliss.”

“Yeah, but you did,” Albert snaps. “And you need to fix it before tomorrow night because I _can’t_ pull this off again. With both of you down the whole team collapses.”

“I can’t fix it, he won’t talk to me! I tried bringing it up again and he just left the room the same as the first time!”

Albert shakes his head and rolls his eyes. “Fine. Fine! Since both of you are being absolutely fucking incompetent about this, I’ll try talking to him for you, but it’ll just be enough to convince him to hear you out and that’s it. Beyond that you’re on your own because I’m sick of dealing with this.”

Albert leaves again and Harry finally puts in his earbuds. He pulls the hood of his sweatshirt over his eyes and folds his arm under his head, and after that he mostly drifts in and out of sleep. A lot of the guys around him are using the same strategy to try and eat the hours between Seattle and Pittsburgh, because it’s not like they’ll get enough time to sleep for real when they get to the hotel.

 _This sucks,_ Harry thinks to himself during one of his waking moments. He spent more time in the box than on the ice during their last game, he can’t get any good rest like this, and Dale’s still mad at him. Despite the first two directly impacting his performance on the ice and by extension his career in general, the third thing still upsets him the most.


	25. Don't Be Sorry

The horn sounds overhead… a 3-2 loss to the Penguins. God dammit.

Gordon does the whole disappointed-but-not-surprised routine with them and then they’re back at the hotel; tomorrow they’re flying to Nashville. Harry doesn’t waste any time getting ready for bed. Until now, during their rare losses Dale has kept up the ritual of them eating pie and watching cartoons together as a way to decompress, but given the way things are Harry’s not expecting that to happen tonight and he just brushes his teeth and changes into sweatpants.

A knock on the door surprises him, but it’s only Albert.

“Come in,” Harry says, stepping aside.

“I told Coop that you weren’t able to get any information out of what you read on his laptop,” Albert starts. “And that you spoke with me about it afterwards because you didn’t understand.”

“And then what?”

“And then I lied,” he grumbles.

“You did? What do you mean, you lied?”

“Alright, it wasn’t exactly a lie, I just wasn’t truthful. I didn’t explain to him the extent of my involvement, I only said that you asked me about it and that I told you you really need to just talk to him and figure it out. And also that when he got upset with you and stormed off it was you trying to explain yourself and he should’ve listened instead of acting like a god damn kindergartner. Both of you are fucking terrible, there was better communication between a couple in fucking Romeo and Juliet when I was forced to read it in high school,” Albert gripes.

Harry shakes his head. “Alright - whatever. What did he say? This has to get fixed.”

“He said ‘Albert, this just proves my point that it would be inappropriate for me to raise the issue at all, because if we can cause such a disruption when we’re only friends, imagine how terrible it would be for the team if we were in an actual relationship and started fighting,’” Ablert says in an almost spot-on mimicry of Dale’s voice. “And then he got really upset because he thinks he’ll have to get traded again at the end of the season. God only knows how he drew the line from point A to point B on that one, but he did.”

“Why the hell would we trade him? And besides that I thought his contract was for two years.”

“You’re missing the point,” Albert interrupts him. He shakes his head at Harry. “Why do I have to do everything myself?”

Albert, being a goalie, is stronger, meaner, and even more stubborn than most other hockey players. So even though he’s several inches shorter, he still manages to grab Harry by the back of the neck and drag him out of the room and down the hall to Dale’s door. His grip only tightens as he knocks and Harry’s sure there’s gonna be bruises.

“Who is it?”

“It’s me, Coop.”

“Albert I’m not interested in-”

“Open the fucking door before I kick it down.”

It opens and Albert immediately shoves Harry in. “Now talk, you idiots.” And slams it closed again.

Harry clears his throat. “How much you wanna bet he’s holding it shut so I can’t get out?”

“It’s highly probable,” Dale agrees.

“Coop, I’m real sorry about reading your emails. I felt bad about it even when I was doing it and it’ll never happen again.”

“Why exactly did you choose to do so in the first place?”

“I don’t know, I guess I was just curious because you’re always so weird about them.”

“I used to write in notebooks when I was in school. Given that I have autism, I didn’t have many friends at that time and also didn’t understand that the other children were perpetually making fun of me. One day a boy from my class and his friends sat at my table, and he pulled out my notebook from hiding under his tray. He opened it up and read multiple pages of it, out loud, to all of his friends. Nothing in that notebook was anything I was interested in anyone else knowing. And yet despite this deliberate humiliation, I was the one who got suspended for fighting.” Dale takes a breath. “You can’t touch my laptop, Harry. It’s not specific to you, nobody is allowed to touch it. Please don’t do this again. It frightens me.”

“Did you beat that kid up?”

“Yes… I’m not entirely sure how I accomplished this, but when the teachers arrived to separate us I was kneeling on his back and hitting his face against the floor by grabbing his hair. His nose was so severely broken it required surgery, and it still didn’t heal correctly.” Dale actually looks a little proud of himself for that. “I stopped writing anything down for some time after that. My father gave me a laptop for my fourteenth birthday, and of course laptops have passwords.”

“Yeah.”

Dale’s quiet for a minute and Harry waits for him.

“You spoke with Albert about what you read.”

“Yeah, I guess I misinterpreted a bunch’a shit.”

“And how much do you understand at this point?”

“Uh…” Harry tries to come up with a way to word this that won’t make Dale panic. “Coop, I know that you. Uh. Have a thing for me. But that’s okay. It’s not a problem or anything and I’m not mad.”

“I’m still sorry for that whether you’re angry about it or not.”

“Dale, _no._ Just. No, okay? Don’t be sorry.”

“It wasn’t intentional.”

Harry shakes his head. “I don’t think it ever is. I kinda wish you’d just told me, but I also understand why you didn’t.”

“It’s inappropriate and, as I understand it, one-sided.”

Harry’s mouth goes dry - here’s the moment of truth. He wasn’t expecting it to come so soon, but he probably should’ve.

“I don’t think that’s true. Coop… sometimes shit happens and teams fuck up. It’s impossible to have an undefeated season in the NHL and there’s always gonna be stuff that comes up and throws off players’ performances. What’s one more thing?”

Harry slowly comes over and hugs his friend. He didn’t even realize how much he missed just getting hugs from Dale and he thinks this is probably how a phone battery feels when it’s getting charged.

They both need to shave… the stubble on their jaws scrapes together as Dale moves slightly, making Harry’s skin tingle all the way down his neck. Dale turns just enough to nuzzle against the side of his face, near his ear, and Harry’s eyes close. Usually hugging a hockey player is like grabbing onto a stack of cinderblocks, but Dale is a little bit less firm than normal, ever so slightly pliant in Harry’s arms. It immediately comes to mind that he doesn’t know if he can resist this or if he even wants to. And thinking about it for all of two seconds, he decides that no, he’s not interested in resisting. If and when Dale tries to kiss him he’ll fall right in line for it to happen.

“Harry,” Dale whispers against the corner of his jaw.

“Yeah.”

“…please?”

Harry takes a breath. “Go right ahead.”

So Dale kisses him… the last time Harry got kissed was like two and a half years ago. Dale tastes like pie, which shouldn’t be as surprising as it is. Harry does his best to mirror the amount of pressure being given to him, he doesn’t want to make Dale think he’s too aggressive or anything because that would be kinda rude. Or maybe Dale wouldn’t care even if he was. Harry can’t remember the last time he felt so damn self-conscious while kissing somebody.

And then Dale pulls back suddenly.

“What’s wrong?” Harry asks. Did he do something?

“Tell me you’re not simply allowing this in order to make me feel better,” Dale says nervously.

“What? No! Why would you - no!” Harry’s really offended by that. “Coop, why…?”

“Because I’ve experienced dreams like this before and it feels too good to be true.”

Harry can’t help it - he rolls his eyes and groans. “You really think I’d do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay, well, for future reference, I don’t do shit like that.”

“Alright.” Dale looks embarrassed. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Harry decides. He looks over his shoulder to the door. “Think Albert’s still out there listening?”

“It’s entirely possible.”


	26. Irredeemable Mess

Harry wakes up with Dale in his arms for the first time in days.

“Morning, Coop.”

“Good morning, Harry. I suppose you’d like to swiftly return to your own hotel room in order to avoid rousing suspicion from the team.”

“I don’t even care anymore,” Harry admits.

He kinda wants to stay like this for awhile, but they have to go have breakfast and then catch their flight because they have a game tomorrow night. Then he makes the mistake of kissing Dale… one becomes two becomes six kisses and Harry’s sinking Dale into the mattress under his weight. Both of them are already getting hard just from this and Harry starts to mess up Dale’s hair on purpose just because he can.

“Do you suppose there would be sufficient time to-”

“Coop I’m not rawing you in a hotel room right before team breakfast,” Harry interrupts, shaking his head. “I don’t have any condoms in my luggage and if you end up skating funny tomorrow night there’s gonna be questions that I don’t feel like answering.”

“All valid points,” Dale concedes, still looking disappointed about it. They both grudgingly peel themselves away from each other and then out of bed. “On that note, when were you most recently tested?”

“Couple years ago after my last boyfriend left me, they didn’t find anything interesting and there hasn’t been anybody since then.”

“Oh, excellent. Unless you have a compulsion about it you should know going forward that condoms won’t even be necessary,” Dale informs him.

“You sure?”

“One hundred percent,” he nods.

“Good… it’s still not happening right now. C’mon, we gotta get dressed and go eat.”

Harry starts to leave but Dale stops him briefly. “One more thing.”

“Sure.”

“Harry, are we dating?”

“Uh… yeah, I guess we are.”

This gets a huge smile. “Thank you, Harry.”

Harry ends up jerking off in the shower just to get his mind back on track, and then when he goes down for breakfast he finds wads of cash changing hands and immediately realizes his entire team was taking bets on his previous will-they-won’t-they with Dale. It looks like the two big winners are Hawk and Albert. (It’s ridiculous in a way - if he can figure out right away what’s going on here, why the hell did it take him so long to discover that Dale was interested in him? He feels frustrated and stupid thinking about it.) Bobby shows him the score sheet for how they took these damn bets and that just annoys him more. First is the circumstances: after a win, after a regulation loss, after an overtime loss, during the bye week, during the playoffs (round notwithstanding), between seasons, during the preseason, before/after a practice, after an injury. And then location: Harry’s house, the locker room, a restaurant (or similar public establishment), on the bus, on the plane, at a hotel, at the hospital, on the ice, other. A twenty dollar bonus would be awarded if a winner could guess correctly whether Harry or Dale made the first move.

Albert and Hawk, of course, had both picked “in a hotel room/after a regulation loss.” Harry looks at some of the others with growing irritation - Bobby picked “in the hospital/after an injury,” Andy went for “during the playoffs/other,” and even Gordon is in on this with his name in a box in the middle of the grid for “during the bye week/at a restaurant.” It kinda begs the question why Hawk and Albert were the two winners, because this betting pool is really fucking specific. Then again each name is in at least two boxes and there are at least two names per box. The most popular choice with practically the whole roster’s names in it is “after a win/at Harry’s house.”

Harry crumples the paper into a ball. “So how much did you two bastards win?” he growls as he sits and starts peeling an orange.

“About six hundred dollars each,” Hawk chuckles. “If it makes you feel better, neither of us gets the bonus money because Albert’s the one who set everything in motion so that voided it.”

Harry shakes his head. “I hate all of you. This isn’t funny.”

What makes things worse is that Dale is the last one to show up for breakfast and they all stare at him because he clearly just got out of the shower and is still combing his hair when he sits down at the table. Harry covers his face with his hands - he knows exactly the conclusion everyone’s drawing from this. The whole meal is awkward and painful for him after that, and meanwhile Dale is cluelessly stuffing himself with bacon and eggs without a care in the world. Harry’s jealous for a second and wishes that _he_ can be the one with autism sometimes so that he doesn’t have to deal with shit like this.

Finally, _finally,_ the team loads up on the plane and they’re headed for New York. And of course Dale decides to sit next to Harry as if they haven’t already drawn enough attention to themselves… although on the other hand, this one small thing won’t make a damn bit of difference. Harry’s just annoyed at his teammates for being jackasses about it.

And then there’s this: “I hope you two realize that I can hear every word you’re saying back there,” Dale announces sternly to Bobby and Mike while twisting around in his seat.

“Why, what’re they up to?” Harry asks quietly, worrying that they’re plotting some huge prank.

“They were speculating about whether or not we had sex before breakfast this morning.”

“Coop, they’re five rows behind us, how do you know that?”

“Heightened sensory perception, it’s a symptom. That’s why so many people with my condition experience sensory overload in response to specific stimuli.”

“Hm.” He’ll have to remember that the next time he sees Joey about to have a meltdown. Then he lowers his voice. “So Coop… earlier you asked me about getting tested.”

“Yes.”

“You have too, right?”

“Yes, several times. I haven’t been in many relationships to begin with and four out of five of them were very short. The first one doesn’t count, either, because I was thirteen at the time and it was with a girl.”

“Okay.” Harry has no idea where he’s going with this.

“It occurs to me in this moment to inform you that I haven’t experienced penetrative sex.”

“And yet you were asking for it this morning,” Harry says, disbelieving and annoyed. “Do you even know what would’ve happened?”

“Of course, I’ve read many articles on the topic and I’ve also seen it countless times in porn.”

“Yeah. Okay. You can’t use porn as a playbook for actual sex. That’s a great way to get yourself hurt.” Harry glances around; thank god, nobody seems to be listening. “We’re gonna talk about this later.”

Dale looks concerned, now. “Will it hurt?”

“I don’t know,” Harry admits. “How is it that you’re turning twenty eight in a couple months and this hasn’t come up yet?”

“The only relationship I’ve been in that lasted longer than a month was with an asexual man. The others couldn’t tolerate my eccentric tendencies for long and very often I’m away for road trips with the team, which interferes in trying to become involved with someone.”

That makes an unfortunate amount of sense. Harry shakes his head.

“Alright. We’re gonna wait until we’re at the hotel or something to keep talking about this, okay?”

Now he’s nervous - _really_ nervous. Harry’s never been anyone’s first and he’s also never bottomed, so he can’t possibly tell Dale what to expect. A lot of what Dale knows about sex, apparently, has come from watching porn. This is an accident waiting to happen and there’s nobody anywhere that Harry can ask for advice, he’s on his own about how to proceed. And it’s also early for them to be talking or even thinking about this to begin with. They’re barely even seeing each other… is it even a good idea? Because now it’ll probably be awkward, and weird, and not very good, and maybe he’ll even hurt Dale by accident and there’s going to have to be long conversations about this which will also be weird and awkward and _Jesus fucking Christ, Dale, couldn’t you have gotten somebody to nail you just ONCE before finding your way to me?_ It’s gonna be an irredeemable mess and that’s not something Harry wants to be responsible for.

Harry thinks back - the first time he had sex with a girl, he was sixteen and it happened in the bed of his dad’s pickup truck out by the lake. He tried putting the condom on backwards at first and after it was over she teased him about it, which really didn’t make him feel good about himself. But the worst part was how unfulfilling it really was. After tv and movies and YouTube and video games and porn, he’d expected this big, mind-blowingly awesome experience. What he got was the most underwhelming three minutes of his life. He actually went home and cried after because he had no idea what he did wrong, why it was such a bad, pale imitation of anything he’d ever seen or heard.

The first time he had sex with another man was in college - there was some football player in his classic literature class who then showed up for a couple of his hockey games, and they hooked up one weekend after a party. That guy was nice, very patient with him, explaining everything. It wasn’t anything exceptional, but it was alright. And right after that Harry got called up for his first NHL game and never saw that football player again, mostly because he just never finished college at all. He did one semester and was suddenly a professional athlete.

And now. Now, there’s Dale, who’s bright and a few years younger than him and _very_ handsome and who has also apparently never been fucked by anybody before. They’re not even in a situation where they could have sex to begin with and already Harry’s getting performance anxiety over this, he’s going to be disappointing and if anything’s wrong Dale might not even know enough to tell him so.

Harry thinks about this intermittently during the flight, then forgets all about it once they’re there and all doing their workouts together. It comes up again when he and Dale are out eating dinner by themselves.

“Harry, you look similar to when we’re losing a game,” Dale observes with a frown.

“Oh. Uh. Look, we can talk about it now.”

“About sex?”

“Yeah. Actually we really kinda have to.”

“Alright.”

“There must be stuff you _have_ done before.”

Dale nods. “I have it on good authority from more than one person that I give an excellent blow job.”

Harry huffs a quiet laugh. “Okay, good. Look, Coop. I never fucked anybody for the first time before, it’s always been somebody who already knew what they’re doing.”

“And you’re honored?” Dale guesses.

“Not really, no. I never thought this would be a thing that got put on me… like you asked me before if it’ll hurt for you, and I can’t even answer that. So it’s a little scary for me, because I _don’t_ want it to hurt for you but I can’t be sure it won’t. That’s enough to almost make me not want to at all. And… y’know what, it’s probably gonna be a huge letdown for you, just because sex is like that for some reason. I might not even be able to get you to come.”

Dale looks concerned. “Are you bad in bed, Harry?”

“No… nobody’s said I am, anyway. It’s not so much to do with how good or bad I am as you not knowing what you’re doing. I want it to at least be _okay_ for you and I’m not even sure that’s possible.”

“What I’m gathering from this is that it’ll take repeated attempts and multiple hours of practice to get right.”

“Yeah.”

“In which case, stalling isn’t helping any, and getting it over with would be a much better idea.”

“We have a game tomorrow night.”

“Yes, but it should theoretically be possible for there to be a progression… you do also have fingers, Harry.”

Oh. Right. He does have fingers. Harry starts kicking himself for not thinking of this on his own.

“Okay, but have you done that before?”

“I’ve seen it in porn.”

Harry rolls his eyes. “It’s gonna be a lot easier for everyone if you just forget everything you’ve ever seen in porn, Dale. Porn isn’t real sex. There’s lots of stuff in porn that would mess a guy up real bad if you tried it in real life.”

“Yes, I see.”

Their food arrives and they’re quiet for a minute as they eat. Harry thinks back to this morning. Aside from the fact that they didn’t have time for it anyway, he’s glad he put a stop to everything right then. If the situation had kept going and Harry ended up hurting Dale by accident he doesn’t think he would ever be able to forgive himself for it. And knowing what he knows now, he feels like he’s going to steal something from Dale that he can never give back. Lots of men would probably kill to be in his position but he can’t help resenting it. And plus this is still way too sudden.

“Coop, I think maybe we should hold off on doing anything for at least a few weeks.”

“May I ask why?”

“Because we’ve been seeing each other for less than a whole day and it makes me uncomfortable when I think about it,” he admits. “And I also really want _you_ to consider if this is something you really, really want from me. Y’know, you’re asking me for something I can’t undo.”

“But Harry, I already have thought about it,” Dale says. “In point of fact, I’ve been thinking about it the entire time.”

“The entire time what?”

“The entire time that…” Dale shakes his head and starts over. “Harry, for the purposes of honesty and clarity, would you like to know precisely the moment that I fell in love with you?”

Harry mentally reels at the word _love_ but tries to keep a level head. “Sure.”

Dale starts to smile. “It was when you bought me the laptop. Your patience and attention to detail had to be absolutely astounding that you took several hours on eBay working to find for me an identical unit to the one I lost in the fire. I don’t believe anybody else would do such a thing, or even care enough to try in the first place.”

“Yeah, I just…” But Harry doesn’t even know what he “just.” Back when he did that, he could barely explain to himself why it seemed so important, so god damn vital, to replace Dale’s laptop. “Well look, either way, I do want you to really think about this even if you already have. Because I’m gonna be honest and say it’s not something I’m sure I wanna do. So gimme a few weeks to think about it, too, and try not to keep asking me about it too often, either.”

“Why does it bother you so much, Harry?”

“Because I don’t know if I can make it not suck for you. Most people’s first times are somewhere between mediocre and downright awful.”

“Yes, I have heard that,” Dale nods. “But presumably you’ve had enough experience by now to ensure that from a mental and emotional standpoint it won’t be even approaching a terrible experience.”

“Yeah, hopefully.”

“I trust you, Harry.”

“Oh. Thanks.”

“I’m also very flattered that you’re so concerned. If it makes you so uncomfortable I’ll do my best not to pressure you.”

“Thanks, Coop.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next chapter is nothing but sex in case you want to skip over it.
> 
> So Cooper having not been nailed by anybody yet even though he's long past due is actually autism-related, it probably didn't occur to him to go out looking for sex and also what few friends he had would've been the really good kind who would probably not pressure him to do something like that and "get it over with." This fic was fully written before I read _My Life My Tapes_ (Cooper's "autobiography" for the odd person who doesn't know about that), but funnily enough, it takes him forever to lose his virginity in that book, too :D


	27. Adjustment

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case you missed the note at the end of the last chapter, this chapter is nothing but sex.

Instead of “a few” weeks, it ends up being two.

Harry feels kinda weak-willed when thinking about this, but it’s more like a dry run in a way. Because today they had a practice, and tomorrow they have a flight, and the day after that they finally have a game. So there’s no possible way Dale’s skating performance can get messed up, even though this is just with fingers. It’s a progression… or something. Harry’s not going to actually fuck him.

One thing he likes is Durex lube. Most guys who sleep with other guys like silicone lube because it doesn’t have to get reapplied nearly as much, but it also stains _everything_ and it’s more expensive (not that he can’t afford it). But also this stuff smells nice, and it can be used for other things besides the obvious.

Case in point: Harry puts some in his palm, rubs his hands together, and starts to massage Dale’s back.

“Coop,” he says, feeling the tough muscles already relaxing under his touch.

“Mm.”

“You ever want me to stop or change something I’m doing, just say so.”

“I will hate you with every fiber of my being if you stop what you’re currently doing,” Dale tells him.

Harry chuckles. “Alright.”

He doesn’t remember who he picked up this trick from… he’s pretty sure it was a woman, but he wasn’t with her for long enough to hold onto very many details. But it’s a good one usually, it’s mentally relaxing or comforting or something but the prolonged physical contact gets the other person all hot and bothered at the same time. Hell, it’s already working on Harry, and he’s the one doing all the touching. He’s seen Dale naked in locker rooms plenty of times by now, but it’s apples and oranges. In a locker room there’s eighteen other naked men around who he’s not at all interested in looking at, and the guys are throwing things at each other and yelling, and the whole place smells like sweat. So Dale lying facedown on the bed with just his shirt off is a thousand times more enticing than any of the times they’ve actually been naked together so far.

“I kinda wanna just keep you here like this,” Harry murmurs, mostly joking.

“Oh, we have jobs though,” Dale points out.

“Yeah, but we’re already rich, we should quit and never get out of bed again.”

“Hmm… at the moment I’m having difficulty coming up with a valid argument against that proposal,” Dale admits with an almost dizzy smile and closed eyes.

There’s a little bit of difficulty - Dale doesn’t like things touching his neck, so Harry avoids that area like the plague. Instead he mostly focuses on Dale’s shoulders and upper arms to start with, and then his back. Damn, he has a great back. Harry regrets wearing jeans for this because his cock is trapped in an awkward position and it’s distracting him.

“Anyone ever tell you you’re gorgeous?” Harry asks before stopping just long enough to pull off his own shirt.

“I’ve heard ‘handsome’ before. ‘Gorgeous’ seems like something of a stretch.”

“It’s not, trust me. And it’s not just your face, either. You have no right to be this perfect,” Harry gripes as he digs the heels of his palms against Dale’s shoulder blades.

“Keep doing that…”

“Sure.”

Harry really wants to stop and take his pants off, but he doesn’t. He’s not sure he will at all, even, he’ll probably just end up in the shower after this because nothing about this exercise has anything to do with him. His entire goal is to make Dale feel good.

Finally, Harry wipes his palms dry on his legs. “Roll over.”

When Dale’s facing upwards again, Harry unbuckles his belt and slides it free of the loops, then bends forward over him to kiss in a line up from his stomach to his sternum and then his collarbone. It’s all very deliberate, taking his time. Harry takes pride in his work at everything. Out in the arena with skates and pads and stick, speed is key, maybe the most important factor. In bed it’s the exact opposite. Any time Harry has ever rushed through sex, it was because the other person was impatient and hurrying him along, and that’s never been something he appreciates. When he has the space to do it, he loves dragging it out as long as possible. Here it’s even necessary. Fingers could still hurt if used wrong… he wants to avoid that at all costs.

“How’re you doing, Coop?” he asks against Dale’s skin.

“You’re making an excellent case so far in favor of your idea to never get up from this mattress.”

Harry grins. “Good.”

He unfastens Dale’s pants and drags them down, standing up from the end of the bed eventually to get them all the way off and catching both socks on his fingertips at the same time so that Dale’s lying there in boxers and nothing else. Hockey players have such great legs and Harry takes a second to appreciate Dale’s thighs by squeezing them in his hands on the way back up.

And another thing - kissing is so underrated. Dale tastes like coffee and Harry takes another second to enjoy that, too. Deep, thorough kisses, still not in any kind of rush. Both of them are perched in the middle ground between serene calmness and excited frenzy, maintaining some level of intensity without hurrying. Dale’s not completely inexperienced at things like this, clearly somebody else has taken the time to teach him how to kiss back really well. Harry should find that guy and send him a thank-you note.

Dale is touching his hair… because of course. For some reason he’s perpetually fascinated by Harry’s curls, feeling and playing with them at every opportunity. Sometimes it makes Harry glad that in the locker room their stalls are on almost opposite ends of the wall because the team would make fun of them for it relentlessly and Harry doesn’t think Dale would be able to keep his hands to himself. Right now, though, he doesn’t mind at all.

“Harry,” Dale murmurs.

“Mm.”

“I’m not sure you’ve noticed this, but I don’t own a single pair of blue jeans or for that matter jeans at all in any color.”

Thinking about it, yeah, Harry does know that. “Okay?”

“The reason for that is because I don’t enjoy the texture of them touching my skin. Please take your pants off, they’re driving me crazy.”

Harry snorts a laugh, but pries himself away from Dale and complies. It’s so much more comfortable for him, too, just not for that reason.

“There, better?”

“Much.”

“Good.” Harry pauses with his hands on Dale’s waist. “Okay, just… remember, if it gets too uncomfortable or you start to really hate this, I want you to tell me and I’ll stop right away.”

“I will,” Dale promises. “Please continue.”

Harry takes a deep breath and pulls down Dale’s boxers finally. His cock is way too interested in what Dale’s cock is doing, so Harry quickly spools through a bunch of injuries he’s had on the ice over his career in order to get his mind back on track again. This isn’t for him, it’s not about him. He takes a second deep breath and reaches for the lube, trying to be less aware of the small (growing) damp spot in his boxer-briefs where his cock is leaking.

He doesn’t even try to get any fingers in at first, just starts with a little glob of lube and then rubbing, teasing, playing, so Dale can feel how slick it is. Harry is watching Dale and Dale’s watching right back. So far, so good. Harry adds more lube (there’s no such thing as too much, except for that one time in the shower when he slipped and almost broke his arm) and presses lightly with a fingertip - immediately, Dale’s whole body locks up.

“Sorry,” he mumbles, looking frustrated and closing his eyes. “It wasn’t intentional.”

“No, I know. Just relax, sweetheart. Lemme take care of you.”

Seeing this, thinking about later on when he eventually will fuck Dale, Harry’s never been more glad to have just a regularly-sized average dick. When he was younger he (probably like most guys) wished he had an oversize porn star cock, because that’s all anybody ever seemed to want, but if some fairy from a Disney cartoon ever came along and granted that wish he’d be even more likely to maim his boyfriend during sex. So, yes. Six inches is fine. He can be okay with that, now.

He gets the end of his index finger in and just stays there for a minute. It’s about adjustment, supposedly, so Dale can get used to the idea of an object, _any_ object, sliding into his body.

“How’re you doing, Coop?”

“ _Ughn…_ ”

“Dale, talk to me.”

“Bizarre,” Dale manages.

“In what way?”

“I’m not…” He pauses. Maybe he’s thinking. “I’m not confident that I can say I enjoy this feeling. But I also want it to continue regardless. Keep going.”

“Okay,” Harry agrees, nodding.

He slides in further so the middle section of his finger also disappears. Dale already seems to be getting a handle on things, because he doesn’t get all tense again, he just twitches a bit in response. For some reason, it’s only now that it occurs to Harry that nobody else has ever gotten this. He’s the only one who’s ever seen Dale this way. He’s a lot less apprehensive after that, and instead feels privileged. He’s not stealing anything - Dale is giving it to him.

Harry gets in all the way up to the knuckle and Dale squirms.

“So it’ll be like this?”

“Uh… yeah. Except more. You’ll feel a lot more full.”

“Yes, that stands to reason.”

Harry wriggles his finger, rubbing up against Dale’s prostate. He feels it start to swell up almost immediately and gets a soft whine from his boyfriend.

“If it ever comes up later on, Coop, you should know that if the guy fucking you can’t find this with his dick, he’s a dumbass who has no idea what he’s doing,” Harry grins.

“I’ll bear it in mind,” Dale gasps, sounding like he’s so distracted that he’s actually just gonna forget right away that Harry even told him that. Harry starts to slide his finger out again and Dale whimpers at him. “No, don’t stop doing that, I was enjoying it.”

“We’ll get back to that in a minute,” Harry promises. He squirts more lube onto his fingers so that the middle one is slicked up, too. “Alright, if this gets to be too much, say so.”

“Yes…”

Both fingertips at once - even going slowly, Dale flinches a little, so Harry stops and lets him acclimate. He strokes the palm of his free hand along Dale’s leg to hopefully make a distraction from the discomfort.

“Breathe,” Harry reminds him.

Dale relaxes and Harry’s fingers continue their slow journey inward. Dale’s a quick learner, at least, and it’s not that difficult to get all the way in a second time. He squirms after Harry starts nudging and pressing on his prostate again - clearly, this is Dale’s new favorite thing.

“Did you read about this in your internet articles, too?” he wonders.

Dale nods frantically. “Yes… they weren’t exaggerating…”

Harry smiles. This is actually going better than he was hoping for, and what would be _really_ great would be if every time Dale thinks of the first time they have sex, this will be what jumps in his head instead of whatever will happen when Harry actually does fuck him. Because this is nice - all Harry was interested in when he started this tonight was making Dale feel good, and it looks like he’s meeting that goal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It took me three days to write this. Porn is harder to do than action scenes and it's one of my least favorite things to write EVER.


	28. Dick-Trick

“Cap, man, you gotta cut your hair,” Bobby chirps from his stall. “It’s gonna get so long you’ll start losing things in it.”

“I was gonna get it cut, I can barely stuff all this into my helmet,” Harry complains. “But the powers that be demanded that I never touch it again. So I guess I’m just fucked.”

“Coop, you need to let Harry get a trim,” Hawk says.

“Inconceivable,” Dale announces. “His curls have a fantastic texture which I’ve come to theorize only exists when they have significant length to them.”

“Coop, I promise, even if I get a couple inches hacked off you’ll still think it feels nice,” Harry groans, rolling his eyes. He’s already said this to his boyfriend at least eight times.

“None of you have _any_ room to talk,” Albert, neatly buzzed to about a fluffy inch and a half, points out.

“Neither do you, you’re going bald,” Harry chirps. “You could make extra money by getting a sponsorship from Rogaine.”

“Believe me, I tried it already and it didn’t help,” Albert grumbles. “And even ignoring that, I wouldn’t take their sponsorship anyway. At least I can be sure I won’t end up looking like you, Captain Mullet.”

“That isn’t even a mullet anymore, _this_ is a mullet,” Mike says, pointing to his own head.

“Maybe his hair is the source of his power,” Bobby jokes. “Like that guy in the bible or whatever.”

“Dale, I’m getting a haircut,” Harry decides loudly.

Looking over, Dale is pretending to sulk, and this gets a round of snickers from the team. Then Gordon walks in and they all instinctively cover their ears - he managed to ruin another hearing aid after dropping it in the sink or something, so it’s back to shouting in horribly echoey locker rooms.

“ALRIGHT, FELLAS!” he booms. “THE PANTHERS ARE NUMBER THIRTY TWO IN THE LEAGUE RIGHT NOW! WE’RE FIRST IN OUR CONFERENCE AND NUMBER TWO IN THE LEAGUE! THEY’RE EASY PICKINGS!”

Harry takes his hands off his head and stands in the middle.

“Guys, listen. I got a real important story to tell you tonight. So my brother is captain of the Bolts, right? You all know that. A few of you might _not_ know that I managed to turn his own son against him and into a Kraken fan.” He gets a few chuckles and grins. “For Christmas, I bought him tickets to this game, he’s sitting right on our blue line for the 1st and the 3rd tonight. Panthers are cats, right? Cats are housepets.” Harry starts pointing. “Mike, Bobby, you two are a fucking _wall_ tonight, you’re not letting anything get near Albert _ever._ Albert, you’re getting us a shutout, that’s not optional. Hawk, you’re not missing a single pass. Andy, you’re not getting hurt, in fact you’re not even gonna fall once tonight. Coop, you’re getting a dick-trick at the fucking _minimum._ Everybody at your absolute best, the only time I better see you play harder than you do tonight is when we go to the Cup Final in June. These are housepets, they’re the bottom team in the entire league, and we’re here to neuter them tonight.”

Helmets and gloves go on, mouthguards are put in, sticks are grabbed, and they all pour out onto the ice for warm-ups. The thing about playing the Panthers is that if the stadium is ever actually filled, it’ll be about seventy five percent occupied by the away team’s fans. Tonight is one of those nights - the seats are packed with green jerseys. He does laps with the guys, then when everyone’s breaking up to start practice-shooting at Albert he skids to a stop on the blue line and fist-bumps Joey through the glass.

“Hey, Coop!” Harry calls out, waving his boyfriend over with his glove.

Dale comes to a stop, very gracefully, and scoops up one of the pucks on the blade of his stick. He bounces it a few times like a paddle-ball up where Joey can see it, then expertly flips it over the top of the glass for Joey to catch as a souvenir. They each give Joey another fist-bump through the barrier before getting back to what they’re actually supposed to be doing. Harry’s sure all the cameras caught that, and every sports journalist everywhere is going to go nuts. The whole “bromance” narrative is as strong as ever and he can’t help wondering what would happen if those bastards knew he’s been with Dale for two and a half weeks now… but he’s also not curious enough to put a target on Dale (or himself) by letting that become public knowledge. Right now, only the team and Gordon and a few of the equipment staff are aware of this. Management, their GM and the team’s owner still have no idea as far as Harry knows.

For about two seconds, Harry catches a good look at his reflection in the glass - Mike was actually right, it’s not even a mullet anymore, his curls are springing out of his helmet wherever there’s enough space to do so and it looks absolutely ridiculous. He needs a damn haircut like yesterday. Once warm-ups are over and they’re off the ice until the start of the game, it gets brought up again by the guys and Dale eventually shouts over everyone that he’ll be okay with Harry getting a trim as long as there’s still enough of it left for him to easily grab onto with his fingers.

It’s always really funny playing against teams like the Panthers - because the 1st kicks off and whenever Harry’s not on the ice and can actually hear, all around them is a repetitive screaming chant of “ _LET’S-GO-KRAK-EN!_ ” from the fans. It’s so strong he almost expects their own goal horn to blow when Dale draws first blood three and a half minutes into the game, and as his line gets off to let the next shift take the faceoff it still goes in his head: goal by number fifty nine Dale Cooper, assisted by number forty six Harry Truman and number twenty two Mike Nelson.

The Panthers play like a team that desperately needs to fire and replace their head coach. None of their strategies adapt very well to playing against the Kraken, their defense is disorganized, their offense can’t pull together as a unit. They’re a fractured team playing a fractured game, and it’s easy for Harry’s teammates to slip in through those cracks and completely dominate the ice.

Harry’s line changes back on man-by-man, first with him and then with Dale; Hawk is still stuck on the bench until the second winger from their checking line can get back off. Dale moves like he’s making a pass and in a way he is, because he’s actively smacking the puck off an opponent’s stick blade and straight over to Harry. He barrels over the blue line with it and whips it back over to Dale, who then shoots and of course puts it in. Two goals in six minutes - it’s beautiful to see.

“Two to go,” Dale jokes when they’re on the bench again.

“Coop, I’ll be _really_ surprised if you don’t,” Harry chuckles.

“I’ll make every effort.”

“You do know I was kidding, right?”

“Of course I know that, it won’t stop me from accomplishing it,” he declares.

Harry just grins. It baffles him that he can tell one of his teammates “score three goals” or “score four goals” and they just _will_ simply because he said it, like the fact that it came out of his mouth in particular is what makes it a reality. He wonders if any other team has a player like Dale, who will put as many pucks in the net as is demanded by the captain just… _because._ It’s incredible.

The first intermission comes and they’re up by three on a goal from Hawk. Albert hasn’t let anything in, mostly because the Panthers have barely been able to reach his net for more than two seconds before the puck is back in the Kraken’s possession again.

Dale gets in the center of the locker room. “Absolutely incredible,” he starts with. “I don’t believe most teams even if they _aren’t_ the Panthers would be able to hold their ground against the performance we’ve brought so far tonight. We have only six more weeks in the regular season before playoffs, and this is top-quality play from each of you already. The only possible thing I can come up with to say is for everyone to keep doing exactly what you’ve already been doing. You’re all outstanding.”

On to the 2nd. The first line gets sent to start, which has Harry beating back a Panther from the center dot and sending the puck to Hawk, who dodges around a D-man to take it into the attacking zone. He throws it to Harry, and Harry smacks it across to Ed, who then gets hooked and the whistle blows.

“ _Florida number thirty, two minutes, hooking._ ”

That’s not ideal, though, because the Kraken are still not great with power plays… maybe they never will be. Even against the Panthers, they can’t score on the man advantage. It’s their biggest weakness as a team. Exactly three seconds after it ends, Bobby puts them to 4-0. Harry makes a mental note to talk with Gordon about doing nothing but power-play drills instead of a scrimmage at their next practice, because this is fucking ridiculous. To make it even more absurd, Hawk gets boxed for holding and then Dale gets a breakaway for - of course - yet another goal, putting him at a hat-trick and the score at 5-0. So being a man down, they’re still better than when they’re a man _up._

Still, though, this is a thrashing of a weak team, and Harry kinda enjoys those. He’s never minded a challenge, and hard-fought victories always taste good (unless they come with a bucket load of injuries), but sometimes it’s nice to have an easy night. So he sits there and grins as he watches all the hats getting picked up off the ice so play can resume, and as is customary Dale digs through the plastic bin and picks one as a keepsake; it’s then handed to one of the equipment guys, who scribbles the date on the brim with a Sharpie.

“One to go,” Dale says, very seriously.

Harry laughs and leans over so the sides of their helmets tap together for a second.

The 2nd ends at 5-0 still, and even with the Panthers being the worst team in the NHL this season Harry’s still really proud of his guys so far if for no other reason than they’re not disappointing Joey. Dale gets pulled aside as they head for the locker room to talk about his hat-trick to Lucy and her cameraman. Everyone’s in a good mood sitting around in their stalls - these are actually some of Harry’s favorite moments to be a hockey player, the in-between times where they’re not playing but just being near each other in a bubble of camaraderie and teasing jokes.

The 3rd… in twenty minutes that actually last about thirty five minutes, they’ll have another win under their belts. Albert is crab-legging around a little in his goal before the clock starts, even though judging by how things have gone so far he doesn’t really need to and could lie down in front of the net to take a nap if he wanted. The second line is sent to the dot and Harry’s tensing up under his pads, ready to go jumping over the bench wall the second Gordon calls for him and his wingers to be the next shift. Even from this distance, Harry can make out the small shape of his nephew in the first row, standing there with his hands and face pressed to the glass. That just gets his adrenalin surging even more.

A Panther gets lucky and has a breakaway, which means the shift ends and Harry is throwing himself over the bench wall and onto the ice to chase after the fucker alongside his D-men. He’s not sure how, but he does manage to catch the guy who has the puck and swipe it away. Skidding hard into a turn so that he’s facing the right direction, Harry takes a few strides and hits it right over to Dale in the neutral zone. Dale, as he’s running up the ice towards the net, actually lets go of his stick with one hand to check a Panther away from himself and then grabs hold again in order to make a shot - and it goes in.

Dale looks so ungodly pleased with himself for this, yelling something at the top of his lungs through a huge smile that’s drowned out by the excited screaming of the crowd in the stands. Harry accidentally crashes into him too hard while celebrating the goal, sending them both slamming down to the ice with their arms around each other. Ed helps Hawk pull them back up again and they cluster around Dale, all grinning and laughing and slapping his helmet.

They’re barely three minutes into the 3rd and the game is all but over at this point. The Panthers kinda remind Harry of old balloons that have lost most of their air and just sit on the floor, wrinkly and small and sad. Meanwhile his teammates are ferocious wild beasts that go to finish off those sad balloons, popping them with fangs and claws.

And Harry… he just loves Dale so much. He told Dale to get a dick-trick and so Dale did it with no trouble, four goals that are as amazing as magic shows are when you’re a little kid and those tricks are new to you. To get one of these amazing and talented players under you as a team captain is a once in a lifetime thing, or so he’s heard. You’re allotted exactly one of these guys by the hockey gods over your career. And Harry got the best one he’s ever seen or heard of, a player who you send when you need a goal _right now_ and delivers every time. Even more than that, Dale’s also an amazing personality to have in a locker room, he’s an incredible leader, and despite all these good traits and skills and the unbelievable level of raw talent he has, he doesn’t even notice how great he really is.

The rest of the slaughter wraps up reasonably quickly because there aren’t any penalties and the Kraken are mostly toying with the Panthers now, not interested in scoring any more goals and just ping-ponging the puck around for fun. When it ends, Harry doesn’t join the others parading back down the tunnel just yet; instead he goes over to the end of the blue line.

“Go around,” Harry yells through the glass. “I can probably get them to let you in!”

It’s a tiny bit of an ordeal, because Harry has to convince the guys to not start taking off all their stuff just yet even though they’re all drowning in sweat under their pads. Thankfully it’s only about a minute and a half until Joey gets there.

“Alright, guys, this is my favorite hockey player,” Harry grins, mostly looking at his nephew when he says it. “Joey, these are my teammates.”

“Hi!” he says, waving to all of them. “My dad is captain of the Lightning, but I like you guys better!”

Laughter breaks out all around the room and Harry chuckles along with them.

“Hey, Albert, tell him how much goalies like D-men.”

“Only when they do their jobs,” Albert grumps, glaring at Mike and Bobby.

“Man, you’re just not fun to be around,” Bobby chirps.

“You bring a Sharpie like I told you?”

“Yup!”

“Alright, hand it over and gimme your jersey, now you’ll have _two_ of these things that are signed by every hockey player under the sun.”

The jersey gets passed around while Joey runs over to Albert and demands to be allowed to try on the goalie mask. Albert, for once, seems like he’s trying not to _laugh_ as he hands it over… apparently even he has a soft spot for rambunctious six-year-olds. One of the PR guys gets dragged into the room and takes a picture once the jersey is all signed - Harry and Dale taking a knee, arms around each other’s shoulders, and then Joey in the middle in his freshly-marked jersey with his arms around their necks.

After all the ruckus is over and they’re back at their hotel, Harry jumps on his laptop before going to sleep because he just _knows_ that photo ended up on Twitter.

 **nhl-kraken**  
VIP in our locker room tonight! Young defenseman Joey Truman with his two favorite NHLers, Coop and @harry-truman! #krakenfam  
|  
**help-yelp-welp** **  
** _replying to @nhl-kraken_  
wait Harry has a son?  
|  
**kmkmo** **  
** _replying to @nhl-kraken_  
@help-yelp-welp no thats his nephew  
|  
**metro-rivs-hockey-girl** **  
** _replying to @nhl-kraken_  
Harry’s nephew is so cute!!!!!!!  
|  
**Magnet0WasRight**  
_replying to @nhl-kraken_  
lmao ik that’s Frank’s son but this pic looks like Harry and Coop are gay dads #trooper  
|  
**ntny201** **  
** _replying to @nhl-kraken_ _  
_ this team is so wholesome i may burst from cuteness overload  
|  
**hatchet-knot** ****  
_replying to @nhl-kraken_  
@ntny201 their not that wholesome, have you ever SEEN an interview of Albert? he makes lemons & limes seem like pure cane sugar

Snorting a laugh to himself, Harry copies and saves the actual photo on his computer and then closes out of Twitter so he can go to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hockey terminology:
> 
> Dick-trick - Like a hat-trick, but four goals instead of three which are all scored by the same player in a single game.
> 
> The only Bruins game I've ever been to in person was an away game against the Panthers when I was in Fort Myers Beach to visit my boyfriend's mom. They won 7-3 and it was an unforgettable experience, and the whole time the stadium was yelling "LET'S GO BRUINS!" even though it wasn't our arena.
> 
> Oh also the next chapter is nothing but sex.


	29. Tremors

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another chapter that's nothing but porn.

“We’ll be on a plane all day tomorrow,” Dale murmurs.

“Yeah,” Harry says dumbly, not really knowing how else to reply because that’s not anything he expects to hear during sex.

Dale’s eyes open briefly to find him. “Harry…”

“What?”

“…please?”

Oh. “You sure?”

“Yes.”

Harry’s not mentally prepared for this. He tries to think - what’s the best spot he can put Dale in for this?

“Okay. Uh.” He feels so self-conscious. “Get up on your hands and knees.”

“You’re a fan of the classics.”

“No, I just think this’ll be the least uncomfortable for you.”

Harry strokes one hand along Dale’s back and uses the other to finger more lube into him, as much as possible. His heart is already pounding like he’s playing in sudden death overtime, he’s so scared that he’ll accidentally injure his boyfriend by doing this. And yet somehow despite this fear he’s still hard, which just makes him feel like a scumbag.

“Dale, promise me you’ll say something if it hurts,” Harry insists.

“I will.”

Harry nervously slicks himself up, putting his dry palm on Dale’s shoulder and using his other hand to position his cock. He can actually _see_ Dale tense up just at the first touch, there isn’t even any pressure yet.

“Hey, relax.” Harry runs his hand soothingly along Dale’s upper arm.

“Sorry. I’m excited.”

“Just calm down, Coop.” He’s such a hypocrite for saying that when he’s the exact opposite of calm himself right now.

The tension goes and Harry starts to nudge his cock in, as slowly as he knows how. It’s been such a long time since he’s gotten to do this and the feeling of this ring of muscle stretching and struggling to learn how to take him in is doing everything it can to turn his brain off, to make him stop thinking and just _act._ Harry won’t let it. The whole head of his cock suddenly pops all the way in and he stops moving immediately when that happens because Dale’s entire body locks up. There’s a little bit of a tremble, just enough for Harry to notice, and he starts petting Dale’s back again.

“Are you okay?”

“It hurts,” Dale grinds out.

“You want me to stop?” Harry asks, alarmed.

“No. A momentary pause should fix the issue.”

“We can stop any time you want,” Harry reminds him.

“Yes, I know. Just hold still for a moment.”

And he does. He keeps rubbing Dale’s back, waiting until it doesn’t feel anymore like his dick is clamped in place. When that happens he presses onwards, as gently and gradually as possible. Every time Dale tenses up again he stops and waits for it to pass on its own. The tremors are still there, though, small muscle spasms in his boyfriend’s legs. He’s not really concerned about those because they’re not that uncommon.

Finally, his cock has entirely disappeared. “How’re you doing?”

“I’m alright.”

“It doesn’t still hurt, right?”

“No. Comparatively speaking the amount of discomfort I’m currently experiencing is minimal.”

So Dale’s still not really acclimated to this, then. “I’ll go slow.”

“Thank you.”

Harry slips all the way out just so he can add more lube, then presses back in again as slowly and carefully as the first time. It’s mostly short movements after that, very deliberately stroking his cock over Dale’s prostate, strictly refusing to lose his grip on himself and escalate further into faster or harder motions. This seems like it might get results, though - the last couple times before this, Harry actually managed to make him come just from touching his prostate. He’s heard about men who are capable of this before but until now assumed it was just an urban legend because he’s never met anybody besides Dale who could actually do that.

Still, despite this unusual talent, he doesn’t think that’ll happen this time. As far as Harry can tell, the feeling of having something stuffed inside him like this is still alien and overwhelming enough for Dale that he won’t be able to get off this way yet. Harry leans in to kiss between his shoulder blades, then reaches down to start jerking him off. The change is immediate. Dale breathes harder and presses into his hand, apparently distracted at least a little from the discomfort. Harry gets all his movements in time with each other and after about a minute starts to draw moans. These noises and the heat and the _tightness_ all go right to his cock, it’s been so long to begin with and even longer since he got to do this without being stifled by a condom.

Dale trembles harder. “Harry.”

“Yeah.”

“Harry, I’m about t…”

Dale’s words fall into a groan and sticky warmth starts to run over Harry’s fingers. He stops moving except for his hand, and once it’s over he slips free and strokes himself until he comes on the backs of his boyfriend’s thighs.

After that, Harry kinda wants to just collapse them into a pile and lay there for a bit, but they’re both sticky and sweaty and it just wouldn’t be a good idea. Instead, he drags himself and Dale off the bed and practically carries his boyfriend into the shower. Harry does all the work to get them cleaned up while Dale just stands under the water, holding the wall because apparently his shaking legs can’t be trusted yet to actually support him. When the mess has been taken care of Harry wraps around him from behind, taking some of his weight and nuzzling into his wet black hair.

“How was it?” Harry murmurs.

“Uncomfortable and strange,” Dale admits after a second, “but I’m not sad that I did it.” He slumps a little. “I’m also glad it was you, Harry.”

“Me, too,” he realizes. Maybe somebody else wouldn’t have cared enough not to hurt Dale. “It’ll probably be better for you next time, too.”

“That seems likely,” Dale agrees. “Previously I wasn’t able to go through with the decision to engage in this type of behavior for a number of reasons, but chief among them was something I overheard in a conversation when I was still in school. A girl was speaking with another girl in the cafeteria about sex, and she warned her that if a boy was extremely eager to take her virginity to the point of pressuring her for intercourse, then it should be considered a red flag and possibly even a danger. This advice wasn’t intended for me but it stuck, in three cases this exact scenario presented itself. After repeated refusals they all lost interest and ended the relationship.”

“That sucks, Coop.”

“In a way, yes. But you didn’t follow this pattern.”

“You made me real nervous.”

“Yes, I know. You’ve never acted exploitive towards me.”

Slowly, Harry turns Dale around and kisses him. He’s relieved - he didn’t hurt his boyfriend or cause some kind of catastrophic emotional damage or anything. This could’ve gone badly, but it didn’t. Harry thinks he can count that as a victory.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I cannot emphasize enough how much I hate writing sex scenes. It's surprisingly less difficult if you're doing a PWP fic, but putting two characters fucking in the narrative when that's not what the narrative is about is really, REALLY hard to do well.
> 
> Somehow, also, there is something so deeply unsatisfying about this chapter to me that I struggled for some amount of time trying to fix it and even gave it to a writer friend to look at and offer pointers... in the end, I found (find) it unfixable and left it as-is. This is not quality smut in a fic by any means and the least I can do is own up to its mediocrity.


	30. #Trooper

It was Gordon’s idea… and the PR guys backed him up on it. This will get out eventually. If it gets out on its own, it’ll be a scandal. Instead, they should put it out to the world on their own terms. There’s just three weeks left until the playoffs, so hopefully that’ll swallow up some of the impact: many sports fans will simply be too invested in the Kraken taking the Stanley Cup to care.

Harry takes a bite of his pastrami sandwich and opens Twitter.

 **harry-truman**  
Before I write anything else in this thread the first thing is that no this isn’t a joke and my account wasn’t hacked. I’ve heard rumors going around for almost the entire season from fans that me and Coop are secretly seeing each other.  
|  
**harry-truman**  
_replying to @harry-truman_  
Eventually somebody’s going to find out anyway and plaster it all over the internet. So instead of waiting for that to happen and blow up I’ll just say it now: those rumors are true.  
|  
**harry-truman**  
_replying to @harry-truman_  
They haven’t been true for as long as they’ve been going around. I’ve been in a relationship with him for a few weeks now. The whole team knows and now so do all of you. They’ve been supportive the whole time.  
|  
**harry-truman**  
_replying to @harry-truman_  
Hopefully I can say the same of all our fans now that the truth is out. I think I can say that after all the support you’ve shown for me and Coop both after we came out publicly on January 2nd.  
|  
**harry-truman**  
_replying to @harry-truman_  
So even before seeing comments on this thread I just want to say: thank you. Kraken has the best fans in the NHL. Most of you fell in love with the idea of us before we were even together. Now you know: you were right.

He closes his laptop and wolfs down the rest of his sandwich, then gets up and makes himself a second sandwich because he’s still hungry. When it’s been about ten minutes, he opens his laptop again and groans at what he sees the first comment - it has to be remedied.

 **captain-frank** **  
** @harry-truman you bastard! How could you not tell me first?  
|  
**harry-truman**  
_replying to @captain-frank_  
Because you’re just my brother. Team comes first always ;) By the way, I’m touched that you follow my Twitter account! You’re getting soft in your old age.

The rest of the comments are at least slightly more benign, and he also doesn’t have to actually reply to most of them, which is always a plus.

 **krakengetcrackin’**  
ok kraken really is the gayest team in the nhl and the rest of the teams need to catch up #krakenpride #trooper

 **hatsforfeet**  
my friends owe me $100, i called it! #trooper  
|  
**a_crushed_bug**  
_replying to @hatsforfeet_  
I don’t think your the only one that called this, bud.

 **albert-r-nhl** **  
** @harry-truman You neglected to mention that both of you were too thick to get this sorted out for yourselves. Let the masses make no mistake: I’m the real hero of this story.  
|  
**harry-truman**  
_replying to @albert-r-nhl_  
Since you’re a goaltender and don’t fight that much I’m going to assume you don’t know how a fist feels on your face. Here’s a hint: it’s not as fun for you as it is for me.  
|  
**albert-r-nhl**  
_replying to @albert-r-nhl_  
@harry-truman You’re just upset because you know I’m right. Take comfort in the fact that if Coop had a Twitter account I’d be trolling him, too.

 **alien-conspiracy**  
Now THIS makes me love @nhl-kraken even more! @harry-truman I hope you guys’ relationship is a long and happy one. #krakenpride #trooper

 **generic-meatball**  
tbh harrys teammates & family members giving him shit on here is the best part of the thread

 **RandomWhiteBoy**  
when they win the Stanley Cup this year it’ll turn rainbow as soon as Harry touches it :D #krakenpride  
|  
**acultofjellydonuts**  
_replying to @RandomWhiteBoy_  
no, Harry is bi so the cup will turn pink & blue. it won’t turn rainbow until Coop touches it b/c he’s gay  
|  
**RandomWhiteBoy**  
_replying to @RandomWhiteBoy_  
@acultofjellydonuts lol yeah you’re right!

 **goopgoopgone**  
@metro-rivs-hockey-girl @bread_boy Hey, we were right all along! The bromance became a romance! #trooper  
|  
**bread_boy**  
_replying to @goopgoopgone_  
this is the best thing i have seen all month! i love them so much i might actually explode #trooper  
|  
**metro-rivs-hockey-girl**  
_replying to @goopgoopgone_  
OMG I CALLED MY GF IN TO SEE THIS AS SOON AS YOU TAGGED ME & WE’RE BOTH SCREAMING!  
|  
**bread_boy**  
_replying to @goopgoopgone_  
@metro-rivs-hockey-girl can i join in on you’re screaming?  
|  
**metro-rivs-hockey-girl**  
_replying to @goopgoopgone_ _  
_ @bread_boy YES SCREAM W/ US! HARRY & COOP ARE SO CUTE I LOVE THESE TWO GOOFS TOGETHER!

 **DodgeballHero**  
oh no but their playing the avs tmrw night, now harry’s going 2 go nuclear after windom straight up murders his bf on the ice  
|  
**positively-grinchable**  
_replying to @DodgeballHero_  
No, I heard he’s injured and not playing right now, so Coop is safe.  
|  
**DodgeballHero**  
_replying to @DodgeballHero_  
@positively-grinchable nope he got back in the lineup 2 nites ago. or maybe hes going 2 go after harry 1st so that n/b can stop him from murdering coop

 **BriggsIsTheBoss**  
@harry-truman you forgot the part where @hawkseyeview and @albert-r-nhl cheated on the betting pool! #albertisafuckingcheater #andhewontadmitit  
|  
**albert-r-nhl**  
_replying to @BriggsIsTheBoss_  
As always mistaking your own lack of intellect for everyone around you “cheating.” Get a life, punk.  
|  
**hawkseyeview**  
_replying to @BriggsIsTheBoss_  
Sad to say it, but I have to agree with Albert for once. And you also didn’t deserve to win anyway.  
|  
**harry-truman**  
_replying to @BriggsIsTheBoss_  
@BriggsIsTheBoss I lost my dignity to their damn betting pool. All you lost was some cash. Suck it up buttercup.  
|  
**MikeN-Dman**  
_replying to @BriggsIsTheBoss_  
@harry-truman you have to have some first to lose it cap  
|  
**harry-truman**  
_replying to @BriggsIsTheBoss_  
@BriggsIsTheBoss @MikeN-Dman Don’t make me have @gordon-cole scratch you two for disrespecting your teammates.  
|  
**gordon-cole**  
_replying to @BriggsIsTheBoss_  
Sounds to me like @BriggsIsTheBoss, @MikeN-Dman, @hawkseyeview, @albert-r-nhl and @harry-truman need to do some team bonding exercises! You can run drills on the ice before tomorrow night’s game to help you work together again!

Harry clicks out of Twitter after that.


	31. Three Ribs, Three Weeks

A white jersey. Shorter than him. Number 77… Earle.

And then Harry is reamed sideways into the boards, an armored elbow in his ribs, and pain scorches through every nerve in his chest. His stick loses his hand as he drops to the ice and stays there, not able to breathe because it just hurts too much to try. So Harry lies where he fell, mouth open and only breathing out because that’s not quite as bad, but he’s on his left side where something went _crunch_ a few seconds ago. He tries to roll onto his back but even thinking about moving just stabs him in the ribs all over again.

Harry watches as Dale picks a fight with Earle and immediately gets his ass kicked for his efforts. Ed is pointing to Harry and screaming at the ref over this. Harry gives up trying to save himself and lets his arms go limp finally. He can’t breathe. It hurts.

One medical trainer comes over and tries talking to him, but he can’t say anything back and mostly he just groans. Even that’s too much, it’s too painful, and Harry stops making noise after the first few seconds. A second medical trainer comes. For a second Harry notices that the arena is way too quiet. Is he really hurt that bad? It only gets quiet when someone’s hurt really bad. Apparently the answer is “yes” because then two guys come over with a stretcher. They take off his gloves and helmet, then roll him gently onto his back (which actually makes it hurt even _more_ to try and breathe in). Harry’s picked up and put on the stretcher, they do all the straps, and he’s taken off the ice and down the tunnel… and then they put him in a god damn ambulance and take him to the emergency department.

It doesn’t even seem like that busy of a night, but he still has to wait almost an hour to get seen for some reason. He can mostly move around on his own again now that the initial pain-flash has gone away, but taking off his jersey and chest pad is torture. The nurse sees him struggling and gets his compression shirt off for him, all he has to do is raise his arms like a toddler getting undressed for a bath. Looking under his left arm, the side of his chest is already turning purple - not a great sign.

The doctor comes in holding a clipboard. “Okay, hockey player…” She looks up and frowns. “Didn’t I have you a couple months ago?”

“Yeah,” Harry grumbles.

“You got crunched again?”

“Yep.”

“Okay.” She sets the chart aside and sits on one of those rolling chairs. “Hold still.”

She pokes around on the hurt part of his chest (which doesn’t hurt and _certainly_ doesn’t make him hate her for doing this to him), then watches him take deep breaths (which is torture), then listens with a stethoscope while he takes even more deep breaths (which is still torture).

“I have a real bad feeling you’re gonna say they’re not just bruised this time.”

“Well, regular x-rays sometimes miss broken ribs, so I’m ordering a chest CT for you.”

“Great.”

All his gear is left in the exam room and he gets put in a hospital gown, and then he’s taken to radiology and put into the machine. It makes noise for a few minutes and they tell him to hold his breath every few seconds, which of course hurts. Once that’s all over with he’s put back in the exam room again to do even more waiting.

The nurse comes back first: “The medical people from your team called, we let them know what was going on and they said they’re sending your boyfriend over with your clothes to pick you up once you’re outta here.”

“Okay, thank you.”

The doctor comes back with his chart finally. “Alright, you broke the second, third and fourth ribs on your left side. You should be healed up in six weeks.”

Harry shakes his head. “The playoffs start in three. I can’t miss those.”

“I’m just telling you what I’m going to tell your medics. You can take ibuprofen for the pain and icing your ribs for the first couple of days should help, too. You’ll have to have an appointment with your primary care office to talk about breathing exercises, and try to avoid bending and twisting or strenuous activities in general.”

Harry already knows he’s going to ignore all of that if the medical trainers will let him. The playoffs start in twenty days and he’s team captain, there’s no way in hell he can sit this out just for a couple busted ribs. When she’s done talking at him and he’s gotten his discharge paperwork, Dale is let in to bring him his clothes and take him home.

“Did we win?”

“Four to one,” Dale nods. “They’re a highly effective team, I’m convinced we achieved this score out of sheer spite on your behalf. Earle was ejected from the game and possibly faces a suspension or a fine… hopefully both. What’s your prognosis? All Gordon said was an upper-body injury.”

“Three broken ribs. This damn ER doc wants me to miss the first three weeks of playoffs, that’s not happening.”

“But Harry-”

“Hey, _no._ Thanks to Albert’s bitching and moaning I know how bad your track record is with injuries and you have no room to talk, Coop.”

“…I suppose that’s fair,” Dale cedes. “At least sit out for the rest of the season, we only have nine games left and we’re second in the league. You can reasonably afford to take some time off and heal, and the last three or four games will be throwaways regardless. So, boiling that down, you would only miss five games. I promise you we can handle that.”

“We can talk about this more tomorrow, let’s just go home.”

Harry spends the rest of the evening lying around on the couch with ice packs piled up between his arm and his ribs, watching tv and letting Dale fuss over him. Tomorrow he’s going to talk to the medical staff - there’s no way he’s missing the playoffs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The injuries NHL players will ignore for the sake of trying to win the Stanley Cup are as brutal as they are absurd. Hockey is a tough sport.
> 
> Also, for those curious, [this Tumblr post](https://toomuchhockey.tumblr.com/post/189835365432/in-case-anyone-has-ever-wondered) from my hockey sideblog is a pretty good description of how it actually feels to get really suddenly and badly injured during a hockey game. (I did get up and finish the game, but I regretted it later.)
> 
> The Stanley Cup playoffs begin next chapter and run all the way through ch. 49, we're on the last leg of the fic. Brace yourselves.


	32. First Round Vs. Oilers, Game 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you who are reading this fic for our boys and don't otherwise give two shits about hockey, here's the thing: playoffs are AWFUL. They are the most dragged-out, horrible thing in the history of _things_. It starts out kinda fun, yay my team is going to the playoffs! And then you sit through between four to seven games that are ALL AGAINST THE SAME FUCKING TEAM. And if you're lucky, and your team wins enough of those games, you go to the next round where it's the same thing. Potentially you will sit through _four rounds of this_. This is somewhere between SIXTEEN AND TWENTY EIGHT GAMES. Horrible. Torturous. Grueling in the highest degree. And the rage, the rage you normally have when your team loses anyway, is amplified by about 200,000. I swear to god I was an inch away from an anger stroke in the 2019 SCP even on the nights the Bruins actually _won_.
> 
> I will try not to bog the fic down with this so much. But it's difficult to accurately portray this level of suffering without subjecting you, poor reader, to some of this grind. And you'll see this in Harry too across the next eighteen chapters - it starts out great for him, but gradually he gets more and more mentally exhausted as the playoffs slog onwards. By the end, he just wants it to stop.
> 
> (Fun fact, I actually had to write up an entire separate document that keeps track of which teams do what in the playoffs so that I won't get confused.)

Game one, first round: the Edmonton Oilers.

Harry isn’t nervous the way he always has been before at the start of playoffs - this year, he has Dale on his wing and Albert in his net. The playoffs for the Stanley Cup are a grind, but his team is second in the league and all the guys are in sync with each other. They have a really good shot this year after going 48-20-14… the only team who did better was, horrifyingly, the Bruins, who had 56-17-11.

Before tonight’s game, Harry ended up in some doctor’s office to get an injection of a long-lasting local anesthetic in his chest so that there’s no way in hell his bad ribs can stop him. Right now, thank god, he’s the only one on the roster with a serious injury, so they’ll be able to get a good strong start. He knows that’ll change, though… it always does. By the end of this, when they bring home the Cup, half the team will be busted up past the point where they should be playing - but that won’t stop anybody.

Harry stands in the middle of the locker room. The eyes on him have more weight than usual, owing to the playoffs patches they all now have on their jerseys. But this weight doesn’t drag him down - it steadies him, keeps him exactly where he needs to be mentally.

“Okay, guys.” He deliberately avoids looking at the PR staff’s cameras. “Look how good we did this season. This is the best I’ve ever seen us be in almost eight years as captain. The Oilers are inconsistent as hell and barely made a wildcard spot, let’s make sure we use that to our advantage. Their goaltending can be all over the place and they can't take much of a beating if we start crushing down on them. We’ve got nothing to be scared of. There is absolutely no reason we won’t make it to the second round. You all know what to do. Let’s go do it.”

Everyone gets up and taps their gloves on the top of Albert’s helmet or the flat of his stick for good luck, and then they’re all pouring through the hallway with Harry at the front of the line before charging down the tunnel and onto the ice. The stands are packed and Harry knows for a fact that hundreds of other Kraken fans are all crowded around the entrance to the arena because they couldn’t get tickets. Harry feels like he’s drank an entire case of Mountain Dew right now.

A white jersey across from him.

He breathes.

The linesman drops the puck and they battle for it for a split second, but the other guy wins it and Harry’s teammates are chased to their own blue line. Andy body checks an Oiler off the puck and passes to Hawk, passes to Ed, passes to Harry, passes _back_ to Hawk and they all start running the opposite direction up the ice. Right as the mob of them are crossing into the attacking zone Andy blows a tire (because of course he does, he’s a damn klutz) and accidentally takes out an Oiler as he slides wildly along the fresh ice surface, ultimately sending both of them into the endboards with an impressively loud crash that probably sounds a lot worse than it actually is. Play doesn’t stop for this, no whistle goes.

Harry, meanwhile, passes to Dale to avoid having the puck get pickpocketed from him and once the nearest opponent is out of his face Dale sends it straight back to him so he can take a shot. It slams into the goalie’s leg-pad and somehow the bastard manages to kick it directly to one of his teammates, and they’re headed back towards the Kraken zone. Speed is hugely important against a team like the Oilers (more than usual, that is) so Harry throws himself over the bench wall so that a line change can happen on the fly without getting a too many men penalty. He lands on the floor and his teammates pull him up again so he can sit, and a couple seconds later come Hawk and Dale after him.

The game gets off to a strong start. Neither team scores early on, and the Kraken’s checking line (two of the three are twenty one years old and the third is twenty four, so lots of energy to spare) have been exceptional so far at keeping the Oilers off-balance. And of course Albert has probably performed some dark ritual and sacrificed a chicken to have gotten his skills, because there may as well be no net behind him for the other team to score on at all. Harry has to wonder if it’s because he’s a vegan.

“They’re a young team,” Harry comments to Hawk and Dale on either side of him on the bench, and also with Gordon standing behind his shoulder listening in. “And they pair rookie lines with veteran D-men. Let’s see if we can’t reverse that, have Mike and Bobby pile-drive them first so we can get into a better scoring position than we’ve had the last couple shifts. And Hawk, you’re one of my best defensive-forwards, so you’ll help them out with that if you can. Coop, you’re our fastest guy, you can probably actually outrun these bastards, so I’ll do what I can to draw them away from you and get you into a spot for a breakaway.”

Gordon’s palm slaps down on Harry’s shoulder pad once to show approval of this plan and right as it happens, as if the hockey gods are watching their every move tonight (which they probably are because it’s the playoffs and all), the Oilers go offside. Gordon sends the first line and the second D-pair and Harry mostly-wordlessly directs Mike and Bobby about his strategy as they make the short skate to the faceoff dot.

Across from him is a baby rookie who probably can’t even shave yet. That already is an advantage, Harry knows he’s big and kinda scary for younger players on other teams to face up to and he also has a reputation (even if it’s not nearly as bad as his boyfriend’s) for fighting. Psychological warfare at its finest.

Harry smacks the puck sideways to Dale and while that happens Mike, Bobby and Hawk between the three of them somehow figure out a way to be in every location at once. No Oiler can move without having to avoid one of them and meanwhile Dale returns the puck to Harry, who skates backwards across his own blue line… and the idiots fall for it. Harry slaps the puck as hard as he can up to Dale and then charges after him, almost clipping an Oiler on the way by but managing not to. He’s maybe ten feet away and Dale’s already making like he’s going to take a shot - this is a decoy, too. Every goalie everywhere is terrified of Dale. So, as soon as Harry’s skates are over the line in the attacking zone, the puck is sent to him and he whips it into the wide-open side of the net where the Oilers goalie isn’t covering.

The horn goes and the stadium screams. They crash heavily together, grinning and hugging and tapping the fronts of their helmets together. After a second the other three join them, all yelling and slapping their backs and shoulders. Kraken goal by Number Forty Six Harry Truman, assisted by Number Fifty Nine Dale Cooper. First blood with seven minutes left in the period.

The Kraken seems to have a power surge after this. They’re doing everything they can think of to collapse the Oiler’s defense and most of the time it’s working, so they spend plenty of time in the attacking zone. Even without scoring goals, getting all these shots off is important too, it can help overwhelm the opposing goaltender and eventually get him to start making mistakes.

The first intermission: “Alright, fellas, we’ve gotten a good start,” Gordon says in the middle of the locker room. “Not a lot of scoring, but we have time for that. Their defense has been caught wrong-footed most of the time, we want to make sure we keep that up. We can’t beat them for speed but we can sure as hell bulldoze them. One thing that hasn’t happened yet, I still feel a need to bring it up: avoid fighting with these guys. We don’t need to waste our energy on that tonight. Harry, Coop, Bobby, you three especially because you’re the worst with this. Get busy on more important things instead, keep on with how you’ve been playing so far tonight, it gets better results.”

And so the 2nd comes. Harry’s line starts with the first D-pair and it’s like the whole arena is breathing in time with his lungs, he can feel every inch of ice and the tension of all the bodies on it. Puck drop - Harry doesn’t win this faceoff, but Hawk is great for back-checking and the puck finds its way to Ed without the Oilers crossing the Kraken’s blue line. A pass almost gets intercepted, but Harry body checks the guy sideways and manages to catch it with only a little fumbling and takes it into the attacking zone. He passes to Dale, passes to Hawk, passes back to Harry, and Andy’s the only one with an open shooting lane so Harry sets it to him. The puck ends up in the goalie’s glove, no rebound. They all get replaced by the third D-pair and the checking line.

It’s a bit of an uneven matchup for a playoffs round. The Oilers are very interested in their players being the fastest guys in the league but can’t always take so much punishment. The Kraken, on the other hand, aren’t as quick on their feet but can absolutely smash their way through a team’s defense and pretty much steamroller whatever’s left when they’re done. So it’s kinda like trying to drop a sledgehammer on a hummingbird. They can’t really outskate this team, but if they do enough bludgeoning they’ll gain the upper hand.

It comes down to the positioning and adapting their style of play. Usually Harry’s team is pretty offense-oriented, but that’s not a great tactic against their current opponents, so the wingers on each line get very invested in doing defensive-forward moves in order to keep the Oilers away from Albert in the first place. This doesn’t give them great scoring chances, but it’s effectively stopping the Oilers from having scoring chances at all. Harry’s not great at back-checking, so he helps the war effort with actual checking instead to keep any nearby Oilers off the puck.

Dale, meanwhile, shines here. He’s the only Kraken player who can actually outrun the Oilers and so gets several breakaways, eventually scoring on one and putting them up at 2-0 late in the 2nd period. Harry never expected anything less from him, he’s a skill-player and a sniper who can also brawl really well so why _wouldn’t_ he be able to outskate the fastest team in the NHL? The only thing Harry knows of for sure that Dale is bad at is aiding their defense, he’s almost purely an offensive forward.

Lucy pulls him aside as they’re going for the second intermission.

“How does it feel to be in the playoffs again, Harry?”

He wipes his face and then smiles for the camera. “Uh, it’s good, we’ve been working real hard for this all season. We’ve got a great team, we’ve got a great shot at beating this thing. I know it’s gonna be kinda grueling up through June but I don’t have any doubts that we’re shooting through all the way to the Final.”

“Last postseason you were taken out by Vegas.”

“Yeah, they were too tough and we were too injured… the only guy who’s hurt right now is me, and I’m getting it taken care of. We’ve gotten a way better start already than last time.”

“If and when you do make it to the Stanley Cup Final, is there any team in the Eastern Conference who you’d be most comfortable facing?”

“Uh… not really. There’s some good teams over there, it’s gonna be a challenge no matter what. Uh. I _can_ tell you that I hope it’s not the Bolts, because I love my brother and I don’t wanna humiliate him like that. Frank, if you’re watching, please don’t go to the Final, if you do I’ll have my boyfriend beat you up for it.”

Lucy giggles along with him after he says that.

“Alright, thank you, Harry.”

“Thank you,” he nods, then walks the rest of the way to the locker room.

“Listen up, fellas,” Gordon starts from the center of the room. “A two-goal lead is not insurmountable for the opposing team. We’ve done an excellent job so far of blocking their access to the net, but there are some imperfections which need to be worked on. First line, your back-checking could be better. Second line, you tend to leave gaps in the neutral zone around the flanks. Checking line, you’ve been absolutely incredible so far and I have no complaints about you. Third D-pair needs to tighten up around the goal line some. Albert, don’t look so bored, it’s bad press.”

A chuckle circulates the locker room and then Harry gets up to talk.

“Okay, guys. Chief’s got some good points, most of us could be just a little bit better. We’re usually an offensive team and we’re adapting right now. We gotta all pull in the same direction, let’s pay attention if we can to how they play specifically, see if we can’t figure out how they’ll try to adapt to _us_ and stop them from being successful at it. This is a long haul, we’ll have at least three more games against them after this and we should already be being careful not to get sloppy and lazy.”

The 3rd starts and the whole arena around them is rumbling with excitement. Their checking line gets sent first because they’ve been on fire tonight and are really doing their jobs at wearing down the Oilers. That turns out to be a great decision, because back-checking aside they manage to crush their way through the Oilers’ defense and score a minute in to put the Kraken up by three goals. It doesn’t go unanswered this time, though; a few minutes after that, the Oilers do finally manage to put one past Albert.

Harry’s line is up. He’s not good at back-checking and Dale is just _awful_ at it, so he smacks the puck to Hawk and sort of hovers in a position where he can get it to his other winger for a breakaway if possible. Then Andy gets tripped and that’s the end of that, their first power play unit takes the ice. This isn’t good. They suck at power plays. And someone must’ve pissed off the hockey gods, because the Oilers get a shorthanded goal out of it… they’re now 3-2, just barely still in the Kraken’s favor.

But Harry knew going in this wouldn’t be easy. Playoffs are like shooter games set to “I am death incarnate” difficulty and he was expecting this, he was expecting the Oilers to have some bite. Albert’s insane number of shutouts during the regular season no longer applies - whichever round, whichever team, there will be goals scored on both nets. It’s unavoidable.

They end up mostly settling on defensive and distraction strategies to eat the clock. Harry’s sure they’ll come up with something better for the next game, but they can’t outrun the Oilers and that hobbles them a little. Harry does his best to work with these tactics but he’s way too much of an offensive player and he gets caught wrong-footed a lot, this gets at least four turnovers in the final fifteen minutes of the game just from him by himself. It’s frustrating for him and the relief he feels when the clock runs dry is indescribable.

Their first game is a win - but it’s only one of sixteen wins total that they need to bring home the Cup. It’s a marathon made up of a bunch of little sprints, until by the end you’re dragging and bleeding and can barely stand up… hopefully the other guy is dragging and bleeding worse, or at least just as bad, so you can have a chance. So Harry has a lot of feelings about playoffs hockey. The closest he ever got was the conference final, his first season as captain of the Kraken, where fucking Chicago of all teams mopped the floor with him and his guys so that they could go on and subsequently get their asses stomped through the ice by the Habs. As if the Habs didn’t have enough Cups already.

His young players are excited and nobody’s injured yet. He has a great team this year. It’ll be long and hard, but the end will be worth it when they carry the Cup home with them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hockey terminology:
> 
> 48-20-14 and 56-17-11 - These are 82 games of the regular season. The first number is the number of wins, the second is the number of regulation losses, and the third is the number of overtime losses. Winning 48 or 56 games is FUCKING OUTSTANDING for any team in real life, possibly to the point of being slightly unrealistic. Oh well *shrugs*
> 
> Blow a tire - When you lose your footing and fall down on the ice for seemingly no reason. (I do this kind of a lot during my games and my teammates tease me about it all the time.)
> 
> Hockey gods - A wide superstition for fan and player alike, which I (like a dumbass) have totally forgotten to include until now. Sue me. Anyway, basically they are an explanation for anything and everything. Lose a game? Hockey gods were mad at you. Injury to the other team? They pissed off the hockey gods. Win a game? Apparently you sacrificed enough sticks for them to be happy. And in exchange for advancing rounds during the playoffs and eventually taking the Stanley Cup, fans very often will "sacrifice" something: so for instance, if my team makes it to the final and brings home the Cup, my sacrifice to the hockey gods in appreciation of this blessing will be to burn my favorite jersey. Now also, the hockey gods are especially present during playoffs. They really show their fickle approval during the Quest For The Cup.
> 
> Too many men - Pretty much exactly what it sounds like. If you take too long getting off the ice, your team can get an infraction for it. This is a huge source of frustration for Bruins fans the world over, because our boys in black and gold don't know how to count to five and so get this penalty _all the time_.
> 
> A note on the Oilers' speed: I do not know this team very well because they're in the WC and when I wrote this both my teams were in the EC (I have since adopted the irl Seattle Kraken into my ever-growing pool of teams). However for many years Connor McDavid was named the fastest player during the skills competition for the All-Star Weekend, and maybe in whatever indeterminate season this fic takes place in they've simply made that part of their culture. If you're actually an Oilers fan and I got this wrong, I apologize.
> 
> **
> 
> Guys, listen... this is not unique to this fic but since this one is currently being posted I'm putting this note here. And I should also preface by saying I'm not being accusatory or trying to guilt anyone.
> 
> If I don't get comments eventually I get discouraged and stop writing.
> 
> Again, not trying to guilt. But this is a thing that has happened to me like twelve times now. I can see the hit count on the fic go up each time I post a chapter, and then nobody ever comments. For this fic in particular it's been between a week and a half and two weeks since I've gotten any feedback.
> 
> On the fics that do get comments, I'll go back and reread those over and over again, because they make me happy. And especially with a fic like this which I put a lot of effort into it's really nice to hear that said effort is appreciated. But then I don't get the comments, and eventually I get demoralized enough to leave the fandom. I'm starting to get to that point again, I have an idea for a fic for these two and then think "why bother." Please, please leave comments.


	33. First Round Vs. Oilers, Game 2 (Aftermath)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some sex in this chapter, but it's only a couple paragraphs and it's not that graphic. It's more interested in describing their emotions than what they're actually doing.

“Okay, guys,” Harry says, standing in the middle. “We gotta learn from this. We’re the better team. Now, for the next two games we don’t have home ice. That can’t be a factor in what we do. We need to keep our heads up, force them into situations where they’re not comfortable. They’re a fast team, we can’t outskate them. So we need to just fucking crush them instead. We’ll be a steamroller, right? Now… not to name names, you know who you are, but some of you on defense were all over the place tonight. That’s what fucked us all up. It’s not fair to leave Albert out to dry like that. We gotta do better next time. That’s all there is to it.”

Harry sits back down and finishes shucking his pads. The locker room’s pretty quiet, which is usual for a playoffs loss. It could’ve been a lot more embarrassing than a 3-2 score, but he can’t help feeling like his guys scattered and choked to some degree. Something was off and they couldn’t pull together.

Back home again, they lay out their gear like usual and start packing their suitcases for their flight tomorrow. Harry feels frustrated but that’s nothing compared to his boyfriend, who’s downright cranky after this loss. That’s not something Harry’s really used to, Dale doesn’t usually get _cranky_ per se. But everything’s always different during the playoffs.

“We’ll do better next time,” Harry says.

“Yes,” Dale grumbles. “Next time.”

“We only have to win fifteen more games. That’s not that much.”

“Harry, if you don’t mind, I would like to not discuss this,” he says. It’s sharp, but the anger’s not actually directed at Harry. “I will already be perseverating on it for some time as it stands.”

“You think too much, Coop.”

“I know.”

“You want a distraction?” he offers.

And this ends up with Harry absolutely railing his boyfriend into the mattress. It’s not so much them taking out their frustration on each other as just burning it off, and after playing an entire hockey game they should really be too tired for anything like this but nobody can sleep when they’re having strong emotions so that doesn’t matter much. It helps. It gets them both back on track. And they completely pass out like that, too, Dale sandwiched between Harry and the bed. It was a long night anyway.

In the morning, there’s enough time for this again… but it’s not a stress release, it’s lovemaking instead like it should be. Dale’s come a long way since however many weeks ago, when it was difficult and uncomfortable - now he opens right up for Harry and it’s perfect. Harry’s still tender with him, though, most of the time. Not because it’s needed, but really more out of respect and kindness. Dale isn’t a _thing._ And so Harry holds him and kisses him and makes him feel good, still too nervous to actually say it to him: _I love you._ Because he does. He loves Dale.

And that’s still somehow shocking to realize. They go do their workout with the team, and then they’re on the plane. They sit beside each other holding hands while Dale watches cartoons on his laptop and Harry reads a book he’s already read. And maybe he’s thinking it so loud that his boyfriend can hear what’s in his head: _I love Dale Cooper._


	34. First Round Vs. Oilers, Game 4

It sticks in his head, and he wants it to stay stuck there, because it’s fueling him now - he’s fucking sick of this team. He’s sick of this team, and he’s sick of their arena, and he’s sick of their fans. Game five will be at home again and it damn well better be the last one in the first round… but to make sure of that, they have to get through the end of this one first. And the end of this one isn’t coming soon, because at 3-3 they’re going into fucking overtime.

It’s what he has to go on now, to hold him up through his exhaustion: just how god damn fed up he is with the Oilers. He needs there to be only one more game in the round after this. They can score one goal, it’s completely doable. But overtime in the playoffs is brutal: it’s a full 20-minute period. If nobody scores, there will be another full 20-minute period. This could, theoretically, go on forever with no winner.

The checking line is up first, thank god. They’re young and still have a little energy left. Harry watches from the bench as they bash their way through the Oilers’ defense and carry the puck into the attacking zone, trying to get into position and open up shooting lanes. When a chance finally is taken, the damn puck bounces up out of play, and Harry’s line is sent with the first D-pair. The faceoff is on the stick-side of the goalie.

It’s a mess all around - first the Oilers center gets thrown off the dot by the linesman and their left wing takes the faceoff instead, which Harry wins. Andy tries to catch a pass but steps on the puck and topples an Oiler as he goes down. A second Oiler just barely grabs it and tries to throw it to one of his teammates, but it’s intercepted by Dale, who goes to take a shot only for his stick to shatter. Ed is too slow to rescue them and Harry is horrified to see the puck cross the blue line into the neutral zone on an Oiler’s stick, he and his guys try to chase but they’re just not fast enough.

Thank fucking god for Albert - he gloves the puck and the whistle goes. No goal for the men in ugly-ass orange jerseys.

The line and the D-pair both change. Harry takes his helmet off and rubs his face and hair with a towel, which for a second gets caught on the side of his jaw - playoff beards are a pain in the ass. He’s not sure who came up with this tradition, to just let your scruff grow and grow until your run in the playoffs ends one way or the other, but he hopes they took a puck to the face for it because he doesn’t like having a beard. It’s even worse for poor Dale, who’s constantly scratching at his face nowadays because it’s a sensory issue for him. The odd man out is Hawk, who simply can’t grow facial hair to begin with. And on most of them it looks downright awful - the three worst are Albert, Bobby and Andy. Ed, actually, looks good with his (and he’s pretty much the only one).

“Coop, stop that, you’re gonna hurt yourself,” Harry scolds, grabbing his boyfriend’s wrist to halt the frantic scratching.

“I don’t like it,” Dale complains. “And my discomfort will continue for several weeks.”

“Yeah, well, once we get the Cup you can shave it all off. Think how good that’ll feel.”

Harry really hopes Dale can stick it out that long - if he shaves before this is over, that’s a sure fire way to really piss off the hockey gods and nobody needs that. The hockey gods probably don’t make exceptions for autism.

He glances over to find that the scratching has started again.

“Dale, stop it!”

“It itches!”

“I don’t care, you’re gonna start bleeding if you keep that up!”

“Harry, if I start bleeding, that’s something that would surely fall into the category of a ‘me’ problem,” Dale points out, and probably to be indignant just scratches harder.

Harry smacks his hand away from his face. “I’m gonna glue you into your gloves if you don’t knock that off.”

They both look back at the ice in time for the whistle to go for the Oilers being offside. The fourth line and the second D-pair get sent, all young guys except for the center, and miracle of miracles the Kraken get the puck into the attacking zone. Harry watches, almost stunned, as Bobby manages to snipe it into the goal, not something he or D-men in general are really known for doing. And that’s it, it’s all done with, they’ve ended sudden death overtime with a 4-3 win. Everyone piles onto the ice to celebrate and then go to the net to tap helmets with Albert, without whom nothing at all would be possible.

Gordon stands in the center of the locker room.

“Okay, fellas, here’s where we’re at: if we can take another win at home two nights from now, we advance to the conference semi-final. Despite the overtime, this game tonight was played skillfully and was an excellent effort on the parts of every one of you. We need to bring that again. Hopefully we’ll know for sure soon if we’re facing the Kings or the Canucks in the second round, but let’s not allow that to distract us. You all did fine work tonight and I am completely confident you can pull it off again in our next game.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hockey terminology:
> 
> Conference semi-final - The second round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
> 
> Offside - When a player's skates cross the blue line into their attacking zone before the puck does. This is a stoppage of play and a faceoff takes place outside the blue line.
> 
> Playoffs beard - Usually an ugly sin against nature. Very few hockey players, even in real life, look good with beards and this tradition needs to fucking die because the results are hideous. Just let them shave, dammit.
> 
> I pick at my skin a lot; my ex-boyfriend used to get concerned about me scratching my scalp too much. That's where the sensory issue comes from for Dale and his terrible playoffs beard. (I have never seen KMac with a beard, ever, and I bet it's probably not flattering on him because he's already handsome and doesn't need things covering up parts of his face.)


	35. First Round Vs. Oilers, Game 5

The horn sounds all around him - Kraken Goal by Number Forty Six Harry Truman, assisted by Number Fifty Nine Dale Cooper and Number Thirty Seven Tommy Hill. His favorite thing to hear. Teammates tap his helmet and his shoulder pads, a 5-2 score with only ten minutes left in the game will be really hard for the Oilers to dig themselves out of. It’s almost over. They’re closing in on the second round.

The puck almost reaches the goal line with nobody around, so Albert comes out of his crease and whacks it up to center ice for the checking line to play catch with. The checking line have been outstanding tonight so far and right now are forcing their way into the attacking zone with all the subtlety of a wrecking ball. Pass, pass, another pass, pinballing the puck around until a shot can be taken - glove save, no rebound. The second line and the third D-pair are up for this one, who can hopefully hold their ground against the Oilers’ defense.

Harry and Hawk are both holding onto Dale’s forearms as they sit on the bench, keeping his hands pinned down so that he can’t keep digging up his face with his fingernails. They don’t have to do it that hard, though, it’s more of a reminder than an actual restraint. Really, if Dale wanted to, he could just shave it off, but he’s as fearful of the hockey gods as any other NHL player and so continues to suffer for the sake of the team.

An interference call against the Kraken - ironically, they do about ten times better being a man down than they ever have when on the power play themselves. Harry, Dale, Bobby, Mike. The faceoff is on Albert’s glove side. Harry can’t win it but that’s okay, Dale viciously steals the puck right from an Oiler’s stick blade and just takes off up the ice with it. Everyone barrels after to catch up with him and right as the first pair of enemy skates hits the blue line is when the horn goes. Dale has both fists in the air, stick over his head, and all around the edges of the arena the hats are raining down for him. Kraken Goal by Number Fifty Nine Dale Cooper, unassisted. It’s his third tonight and he’s put them up 6-2 with 7:19 left on the clock.

The Oilers implode after that. Their offense falls apart and most of their remaining time on the man advantage is spent battling in the neutral zone just for control of the puck. In the final five, despite their hopeless situation, they pull their goalie for the extra skater and Hawk scores on the empty net from the Kraken’s own blue line. The game is already over long before their stadium announcer can call one minute remaining in the period, the fans are standing up screaming, and when the clock runs dry there isn’t a single Kraken player (except probably Albert) without a huge smile on his face.

They pour out onto the ice from the bench to hug their goalie and each other, all in a huge cluster by the net. Dale and Harry both grab onto Albert together and manage to lift him an inch and a half off the ice for about three seconds, which he _hates_ and will inevitably get pissy with them for later on at a more convenient time.

Both teams line up to pass by and shake hands with each other. It’s done respectfully, there’s no gloating. Harry actually played with the Oilers’ captain back when he was with Columbus, so they end up hugging for a second instead. And then the march to the locker room, except Hawk, who does the postgame interview with Lucy.

“Alright,” Harry grumbles as they come into the locker room. “Let’s get this over with.”

“The tradition?” Andy asks.

“Yeah, the damn tradition. Just hurry up so I can shower.”

“What tradition?” Dale wonders.

“You’re about to find out, man,” Bobby snickers.

All the bottles of Gatorade are rounded up - there’s more than enough to be sure, even with five of them getting dumped. The helmets are collected and the vent holes are covered by sock tape first, and then the dumping commences. Gordon gets off easiest, because for one thing since he’s in a suit he’s allowed to wear a towel around his neck and shoulders and for another they just pour one bottle over his head. Next is Albert, who’s really not thrilled about this idea; only about half a bottle can actually fit in his helmet, but he has to keep it on until the remaining three of them have gone through it. Dale, by now, is horrified because he realizes he’s next - two and a half are poured into his helmet, and then not only is it tipped down but also jammed onto his head and then slapped a little on top while he’s sputtering and carrying on. Then comes Ed, being the other assistant captain, and finally Harry is up. He squeezes his eyes shut and way too many hands are smacking his helmet as the lukewarm sports drink is gushing down his neck and into his shoulder pads.

Once Harry’s been dumped, their teammates gather around to take the helmets back off and rub their heads dry for them. Harry pulls Dale over and kisses his forehead to make him feel better after this dumbass ritual, and finally everyone starts shucking their pads and jerseys. There are big grins all around - they’re going to the conference semi-final next week.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hockey terminology:
> 
> Interference - Checking an opponent when the puck is outside of a certain distance away. An infraction.
> 
> Pulled goalie - This is a tactic of desperation that usually happens in the last five minutes of a game. If the coach is so inclined, they can bench the goalie in order to put an extra skater on the ice, therefore making it 6-on-5 and giving them essentially a man-advantage to theoretically give them a chance to score needed goals. HOWEVER. This is risky because, obviously, there's no fucking goalie in the net anymore. 60-80% of the time, this results in absolutely nothing, they end up pinballing in one end of the ice and there are no goals scored on either side. More often than not, though, an opposing player might get a breakaway or take a shot from far away which will just go sailing right into the empty net on the other end of the ice. Very rarely, so rarely that I can actually only remember off the top of my head one time where it worked in favor of the team who pulled their goalie, they will be able to even up the score and go to overtime.
> 
> I do not know of any hockey teams who actually do the thing with the Gatorade like I described it here... however, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to learn that this is actually a thing.


	36. Harry Runs The Team

“I like it,” Dale declares, shamelessly running his fingertips through Harry’s beard.

“I thought you hated it,” he chuckles.

“No, I hate it on _me._ On you, I like it,” his boyfriend clarifies. “It serves the function to make you appear even more masculine.”

“And I wasn’t before?”

“Of course you were. What I meant is that it enhances-”

“I was teasing you, Coop.”

“I see.” Dale leans across the couch now and nuzzles lightly against Harry’s cheek, causing him to laugh a little - it’s ridiculous, but also cute. “Incidentally, the rough texture of facial hair is explained by the fact that these hairs have an identical density to copper strands of the same thickness.”

“Really.”

“Yes.”

Dale doesn’t have the chance to keep talking about it because the door gets banged on, so Harry gets up and opens it - Hawk has showed up first. And he brought beer!

“Thought we could use these to cope with Albert,” he jokes as he comes in, lifting the box slightly.

“Yeah, set those right over on the table,” Harry grins.

Hawk leans around him slightly to look: “Your boyfriend is scratching again.”

“Coop! Knock it off!” Harry yells over his shoulder before popping open the flaps on the end of the box and pulling out three cans of Rainier.

They shouldn’t actually be drinking beers, it goes hugely against their diets especially during playoffs, but one can each shouldn’t be too big of a deal and he already knows Albert won’t be having any. Besides, it can live in his fridge for a few weeks until he’s allowed to drink it again. (And also Harry feels like this is the first recklessly irresponsible thing he’s gotten to do in like, a year. He should be allowed to treat himself once in awhile.)

Albert arrives shortly after Hawk.

“For the record, I find it absolutely _fantastic_ how whenever it’s not snowing in this miserable corner of the country it’s because it’s fucking raining instead,” he gripes as he comes in the door.

“Nice to see you, too,” Harry says.

The other three all sit at the table while Harry stands at the stove. He fries Albert’s veggie burgers first so that they won’t get any meat juice in them and then starts in on a mountain of actual burgers.

“Have you fellas seen the lineup for the second round yet?” Dale asks, gingerly sipping on his beer and looking like he really isn’t enjoying it.

“Sure have,” Hawk nods. “Hey, Harry, what did your brother have to say about it?”

“I called him this morning,” he chuckles. “He said ‘hello’ and my first words to him in that conversation were ‘Frank, _kill them._ ’ He said he’ll do his best.”

“Of course if that happens, then the Lightning will go to their conference final,” Albert points out. “Are you prepared to face him in the final round supposing he wins that one, too?”

“No,” Harry admits after a second. “But it’d be a hell of a lot easier than facing the Bruins, that’s for sure.” He reaches over and takes a swig of his beer.

“Their captain won’t be playing at all,” Hawk says. “Officially, his wrist is too badly broken after he landed on it funny during their final game against Montreal, I just saw an article about it this morning. He’s definitely out for the entirety of their playoffs run while it heals, otherwise he could have nerve damage and not be able to play at all anymore.”

“Now why were you reading articles about them, Hawk?” Dale questions.

“It wasn’t really on purpose, my girlfriend showed it to me on her phone.”

“There’s salad in the fridge if you guys wanna start on that while I’m cooking,” Harry offers as he sticks the first pair of finished meat patties into the tinfoil.

“What kind?”

“The kind with vegetables, and maybe even a dressing of some kind if you’re up for it,” Harry grins sarcastically.

“Lettuce, tomatoes, bell peppers, carrot, uncooked red onion,” Dale says. “There’s also the option of shredded cheese, but he left that separate taking into consideration Albert’s dietary choices.”

“But I thought onions are the bane of your existence, Coop,” Albert mocks.

“No, only if they’re cooked. Harry, I’m concerned.”

“About what, Coop?”

“If we continue to the conference final I’ll be soaked in sugary sports beverages a second time, which is something I can’t say I appreciate.”

Well that’s a non-sequitur if Harry’s ever heard one. “Uh… that’s just kinda too bad, Dale. You have a letter on your chest, they’re gonna do it whether you like it or not. There’s not really anything I can do to stop it.”

“Besides, it’s a privilege,” Hawk adds. “You’re one of the leaders on the team, it’s a camaraderie thing.”

“But it’s sticky,” Dale complains. “And I still haven’t gotten the smell out of my shoulder pads.”

“You’re fine,” Albert grunts dismissively.

“Albert, I have sensory issues.”

“Doesn’t change the fact that you’re fine,” he snorts.

“Albert, if you can’t be nice to him, I’m gonna have to deck you,” Harry threatens, not sure if he actually means it or not.

“Doesn’t that fall under the category of preferential treatment? I’m self-aware enough to know that I’m not nice to _anybody_ if I can help it, and also I think it’s safe to say that if your boyfriend wanted me punched, he’d do it himself.”

“He does have a point there, Harry,” Dale admits.

“I love how having lunch with you three means I get to see a captain and an alt-captain arguing whether they should get to deck their own goalie or not,” Hawk snorts.

Harry rolls his eyes and has another swig of beer. “He’s being a shit.”

“Harry, he’s a teammate.”

“Yeah… doesn’t change the fact that he’s a shit.”

“Me being a shit aside,” Albert interrupts, “if you give me a concussion I’m sure even you can realize on your own that we won’t make it to the conference final.”

That is actually a really good point… not that Harry will ever tell him so.

“Well you could at least _try_ to be less of an irritating bastard.”

Harry glances over his shoulder in time to see Dale’s hand go up.

“Gentlemen, this is all completely beside the point. The most important fact remains that I don’t enjoy being needlessly soaked with Gatorade. However,” he says, silencing Hawk with a look, “in this case I will make an exception and allow it in the interests of team unity.”

“Good for you. You still have no reason to be so bitchy about cooked onions.”

“Albert, I swear to god-” Harry starts.

“Harry, it’s fine.”

Harry keeps frying while the other three continue bickering about Albert’s behavior for awhile - this somehow leads to a discussion about trading Hank to the Caps last fall. Finally Harry turns off the stove and moves the box of beer cans to the bottom of his fridge so there’s space to put down the food. Burgers, cheese slices, ketchup, regular mustard, spicy mustard, dill relish, salad, two different kinds of dressing, shredded cheese, water for Albert, milk for everyone else.

Harry and Hawk both pile condiments on their food haphazardly and get right to stuffing their faces, while Albert takes reasonable bites of his salad and Dale is still carefully putting exact amounts of yellow mustard and relish on his burgers after taking almost a full minute to center the cheese slices onto the patties.

“Not to get depressing, but who do you think we’ll lose to trades at the end of the season?” Hawk wonders before taking another huge bite.

“I signed a two-year contract,” Dale offers, “so I have at least one more season. Hopefully I won’t be traded at all following that. I enjoy being on this team.”

“Mine’s just for one year,” Albert admits. “Apparently Jeremy Horne decided to buy into the Capitals’ line of thinking.”

“No, they won’t toss you,” Harry argues, shaking his head and wolfing down almost half of his current burger at once.

“Why wouldn’t they?”

“Because you’re real good at what you do.” He starts to put dressing into his salad bowl. “And because I told them not to. I actually went to Ben’s office and talked to him about it, he said he’ll make sure Jerry signs you for a six-year contract after this.”

Albert looks really surprised. “Since when does a team captain have a say in what the owner or the GM does?”

“Since they like their head coach and their head coach likes me,” Harry shrugs. “So I have a little bit of clout thanks to Gordon.”

“You really thought Gordon’s the one running the show around here?” Hawk says. “Even he listens to Harry, and his ears don’t even work.”

“I’m also incredibly shocked to hear you of all people sticking up for _me,_ ” Albert admits.

“I asked him to,” Dale explains.

Harry rolls his eyes. “Yeah, you did, I was gonna do it anyway. Albert, you listen to me. I hate you. You’re an incredible pain in my ass and your attitude is the worst thing I’ve _ever_ seen in my career, and this is after one of my teammate’s faces got ripped open on a skate back when I was with Montreal. But you’re good. You’re way too good to just pass up. You hold Bobby and Mike accountable for when they wanna be running around body-slamming opponents instead of doing their actual job, you don’t join in on the dumbass locker room pranks, and you’re way smarter than at least half the roster. So yeah, you’re getting another six years here if you want them. You’re fucking welcome.”

“ _That’s_ why it’s him running the team,” Hawk adds, jerking his thumb at Harry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hockey terminology:
> 
> GM - Short for general manager. The GM does trades, negotiates with players' agents during the signing of contracts, and sometimes is in charge of whether to keep or replace the head coach. Usually it's also the GM who decides which players to call up from the farm team to fill in for injured players on the main roster. Very rarely, the head coach might also serve as the GM, but in modern sports this is unusual and possibly frowned upon.
> 
> So Ben Horne owns the team and Jerry is their GM, but if the way he is in the show is anything to go by he's not that bright so he probably just does whatever Ben says. In effect, Ben is also serving as GM even though his brother technically fills the position, hence Harry talking with Ben instead of Jerry about Albert's contract. (However even that by itself is very unusual. The team captain doesn't normally get a say in these things and so officially Harry has nothing to do with Albert's contract.)
> 
> ADDENDUM. See [this Tumblr post](https://zigcarnivorous.tumblr.com/post/633832828667379712/ciuro-i-wasnt-planning-on-watching-the-war-for) for an idea of what Harry's playoffs beard might look like!


	37. Second Round Vs. Canucks, Game 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I better see you guys all panicking in the comments of this chapter! >:)

Shit really starts when Ed takes a puck to the jaw and immediately gets off the ice, drooling blood and spitting out pieces of his teeth. This isn’t just bad for the obvious reasons, but also because Andy went limping down the tunnel at the end of the 1st after landing funny. They’re down a whole D-pair, now.

Play doesn’t stop because there’s no penalty that can be assessed here - the Canucks have gotten away with it, and after losing the first game to them two nights ago Harry is in absolutely no mood for their assholery. His line is changing on man-by-man but he’s not interested in the puck at the moment. Instead, he immediately brings the game to a screeching halt by picking a fight with the guy who smashed his alt-captain in the face thirty seconds ago. For a glorious moment, Harry’s entire universe boils down to their fists flying at each other, and the other guy’s helmet is knocked away and he falls backwards with Harry still all over him and then it ends because the ref and the linesmen pry them apart. Killjoys in their stupid stripy shirts. Demon-zebras who’re probably getting paid off to not call all the interference penalties against the Canucks that pretty fucking obviously should’ve been punished earlier.

Harry gets a fighting major plus a ten minute instigator penalty, which means he’s now out until almost halfway through the 3rd. He knows he should’ve seen that coming, but right now he doesn’t care. Anyone who hurts his friends is gonna get their face broken.

He watches from the box as Albert stops about eight shots from enemy players and then Mike of all people helps Dale fight the puck into the attacking zone and of course score a shorthanded goal. It’s ridiculous how they can do _this_ with some consistency but can’t score on a power play to save their lives.

They go to the second intermission with a 2-1 score in their favor.

Gordon glares at him from the center of the locker room. “Harry, that was a really dumb decision.”

“You’re just saying that ’cause you’re gonna get fined, coach!” Bobby yells out from the corner.

“Anyway,” Gordon continues, looking annoyed, “he’ll be out for the next eight and a half minutes once we start the 3rd, so we gotta bear that in mind and compensate for it. Ed and Andy are officially not coming back to finish this game also, so adjust for that, too. The last thing I heard about them is that Andy’s being assessed for a groin injury and Ed may have a fractured lower jaw, he also lost several teeth on the bottom. Our injury count is officially up to three. Let’s try not to let it get any bigger. Coop?”

Dale stands up to take a turn, just barely done re-combing his hair.

“This team, you’re all already aware, presents a number of difficulties which are often dissimilar to the ones we faced against the Oilers. In general, the Canucks seem to be capable of a decent offensive and defensive style of play. However, proficiency in both can mean mediocrity. They do not consistently excel in either area. I would like to propose, Gordon, that we choose one of these aspects of their play and simply hammer it down to nothing. I’ve noticed certain deficiencies in their power play units and in their checking line. We can use these to our advantage.”

They both look at Harry.

“Second D-pair and our checking line,” he suggests, not standing up from his stall. “Try to time it so we’re sending them against Vancouver’s checking line if we can. And our second line should probably take their fourth, whenever possible. Pick holes in their offense against their younger and more energetic players so they’re less effective once their veterans are all worn out.”

“We’re down two defensemen,” Gordon repeats, taking over. “Those of you left, try to save your energy as much as possible, you’re in for longer shifts by about half.”

And so starts the 3rd, with Harry still on his instigator penalty against the kid who busted Ed’s jaw. Gordon throws their checking line against the Canucks’ checking line and they beat back five blue jerseys into their attacking zone; one does eventually get a breakaway, but Albert’s there and nothing comes of it. Dale loses a faceoff in their end but immediately steals the puck back with help from Hawk and drags everyone all the way to the other end of the ice behind him. He doesn’t score this time, but he definitely keeps the Canucks busy for awhile until play stops again and he returns to the bench.

Eventually things seem to be going right for the Kraken. Their opponents’ offense is definitely starting to crack in places and then Harry is finally, _finally,_ back on the ice with his line.

There’s just over seven minutes left in the game, they’re up by one which isn’t much of a lead but it’s still a lead anyway. They’ve got this.

Harry takes a faceoff and wins it by a hair, slapping it over to Hawk who passes to Dale. They’re about to break out of the neutral zone when a Canuck boards him, _hard._ Harry can only watch, too far away to help (as if there’s anything he could even do about this to begin with), as his boyfriend goes flying headfirst into the glass with a _bang_ so loud they can probably hear it all the way up in the highest, shittiest seats of the stadium. Harry skids to a stop, he hears the whistle, and the fucking Canucks actually look fucking pleased with themselves over this. Dale, meanwhile, just lies there. He doesn’t try to get up, he doesn’t even twitch.

Harry charges over and drops to his knees. “Coop?” Nothing. Head injuries are so dangerous, maybe he hurt his neck too… Harry pokes him, very gently, on the shoulder. “Coop. Dale. Say something.” His eyes aren’t even open. “Dale. Dale, get up, you’re scaring me.”

“Ughn…”

Thank god, thank god, signs of life, even if it’s just a groan. This is already really bad. Head injuries where the player loses consciousness are almost the worst possible way to get hurt.

“Dale.”

“Huh…” His eyes roll open and Harry almost stops breathing, his right pupil is big and doesn’t move like his left. “Ughhh…”

“Dale,” Harry says again, trying to get some actual words.

Dale moves a little, his skates scrape against the ice and his fingers close. Good. Good. His neck isn’t broken. “Heh…”

It takes him a second to figure out that Dale’s trying to say his name, to get his attention. Right when he realizes it, the medics are here, they make him get out of the way. Harry remembers this awful silence in the arena from just a couple months ago, when he broke his ribs. It seems like it takes way too long for them to bring a stretcher. They take off his helmet and put one of those plastic things around his neck to keep his head still even though he’s barely moving anyway, then gingerly get him onto the stretcher and strap him down so they can wheel him off the ice.

Harry scoops up Dale’s helmet and stick, skates back to the bench. There’s six minutes and thirty nine seconds still on the clock, which he doesn’t know if he can actually play for. Gordon seems to understand this without saying a word and keeps him benched, further hobbling their offense. They win, like so many other times, thanks to mostly Albert being superhuman in his net. And afterwards the locker room has that same awful quiet. Nobody gets undressed, nobody makes any chirps, nobody moves in their stalls. They’re all watching Harry or watching Gordon… and after about twenty minutes of his hell, their head coach’s phone buzzes in his pocket.

“Hello? Yes, speaking.” A pause. Everything shows on Gordon’s face. “Yes, I see. Thank you for letting me know.” Gordon looks right at Harry. “A blood vessel in his brain ruptured, he’s on the table right now.”

Harry doesn’t actually remember getting stabbed right through the chest by something, but the feeling overtakes him. He also doesn’t remember making a decision to start crying, or seeing all his teammates get up from their stalls to hug him, but suddenly both those things are happening too. He’s whimpering into the jersey and pads of Albert of all people while everyone else is pressing in to touch his head, shoulders, back with their palms. Dale is getting his skull cut open from a bad hit.

There is absolutely no point in Harry going to the hospital yet, but he does anyway. He checks in with the desk and is brought to some waiting room for surgery patients, and then gets up constantly to pace or to drink water or to ask them if there’s any news, which always gets the answer “no.” Sometimes he sits and cries some more, silently, the tears running down to soak into his beard. Hockey players _die_ from these kinds of injuries.

Finally: “For Dale Cooper?”

He gets led through way too many hallways to PACU (an area he’s unfortunately familiar with by now after plenty of his own injuries on the ice). Some hospitals don’t let visitors into recovery… thank god this one does. There are only two other patients, and they’re far away from Dale. Harry comes into the curtain and stands there, reaching to grab his hand.

Dale’s fingers twitch and he looks.

“Harry… is our shift going back on?”

“No,” Harry whispers. “Coop, you’re in the hospital.”

“I am?”

“Yeah. Why do you think it’s so dark and quiet?”

“Yes, that stands to reason…”

“You hit your head real bad in the 3rd.”

“Oh. Did we win?”

Did they? Harry has to think for a second. Yes. They did, actually… a bitter victory.

“Yeah, we won.”

“Your eyes are red…”

“Yeah. I. Yeah. You scared me.” He swallows. He refuses to cry more than he already has. “It was really scary seeing you get taken down like that. The bastard who did it got a two minute minor for boarding and that’s it… fucker should’ve been suspended for it.”

“Can we go home?”

Harry realizes just how big of a mess this is.

“Uh. No. I mean, I can. But you have to stay here so they can watch you for a little while. You’ll miss a couple games.” _You’ll miss the rest of the playoffs._ “It’s okay. Just rest up for a few days, Coop.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hockey terminology:
> 
> Demon-zebras - This is not actually an official term, another Bruins fan on Tumblr coined this phrase when she was upset at the refs for being bastards and I liked it so I borrowed it to use here :D
> 
> PACU - Not a hockey term, but a medical one: post-anesthesia care unit. (I used to work at a hospital.)


	38. Second Round Vs. Canucks, Game 4 (Aftermath)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm in an awful headspace so this chapter is going up four hours early because that way I can stop thinking about it.

“Alright, fellas, here’s the news on our guys,” Gordon starts as they’re stuffing their pads into their gear bags. Everyone pauses and looks up. “Andy has a partial muscle tear in his groin, he’s having surgery tomorrow to repair it and will be back on the ice by game six. Ed has also had surgery, it was very successful, there are plates and screws in his jaw so he’ll have to wear a bubble when he comes back for game five. Coop has recovered from surgery but not from the concussion, he has signed a waiver with the medical staff and will also be back on the ice for games five and six, during practices he’ll be in a no-contact jersey.”

“Are you shitting me?!” Harry bellows. “It he gets hit in the head again he could just drop dead on the ice, we can’t let him back on!”

“He signed the waiver,” Gordon says helplessly. “I’m limiting him to thirty-second shifts and he’s not allowed to fight. If he gets nauseous we send him down the tunnel to the quiet room.”

“Coach,” Albert butts in, “I know you’ve only worked with Coop for one season, so you should know that that poor dumb bastard is was and always will be the absolute _worst_ at following instructions that will protect his health and safety. You should at least bench him for the rest of the series against Vancouver, he _will_ get hurt again or possibly die like Harry said if you don’t.”

Gordon frowns. “The Department of Player Safety-”

“Is fucking worthless and you know it,” Harry barks. “If they weren’t, guys like Hank Jennings and Windom Earle wouldn’t still be allowed to play in this league.”

“I’ll scratch him for game five and see where he’s at for game six.”

That seems like the best Harry’s gonna get, so he drops it for now. Getting into a huge fight with Gordon in the middle of the locker room isn’t going to solve anything. They all pack up and leave to go back to their hotel, and once Harry’s in his room he pulls out his phone.

“Hello?”

“It’s me, Coop.”

“Did we win tonight? The television screen still hurts my eyes.”

“Yeah, we won. Hopefully there’ll only be two more games and then we’re on to the conference final.”

“Wonderful.”

“Coop, I wish you didn’t sign that waiver.”

“What waiver?”

“With the medical staff.”

“Oh.” A pause. “Harry, it’s the playoffs.”

“Yeah, but if you hit your head again… darlin’, you needed surgery for a bruise on your brain. That’s really dangerous.”

“Yes, I’m aware of that. However you continually undo any healing progress for your ribs by also continuing to play and take hits. Eventually this may lead to flail-chest or a punctured lung. I would argue you’re in exactly as much danger as I am.”

“I’m not concussed,” Harry argues.

“Harry.”

“What?”

“I love you.”

That freezes him for a second… neither of them has said that before. Maybe they already should’ve earlier. He smiles.

“I love you, too, Dale.”

“Please let me play.”

“Every time you take a hit I’m gonna panic.”

“Yes, but I already do that whenever you’re checked on your left side. I know you understand why I’m asking for this. The NHL is very far from a career choice, it’s a fundamental part of our being as people. I need to play and help the team bring home the Stanley Cup.”

The worst part is Harry _does_ understand all this. And he knows that in his boyfriend’s place, he would make the exact same decision.

“Some conditions,” he says finally.

“Yes?”

“Gordon’s limiting you to thirty seconds per shift with no fighting. You need to follow those rules.”

“Alright.”

“And if you suddenly feel like you’re gonna fall over or puke, you go straight for the quiet room, too.”

“…okay, Harry.”

“I don’t want you to get more hurt.”

“I know.”

“Alright, we’ll be home tomorrow. I want you to rest up as much as you can.”

“I will,” Dale promises. “It’ll be alright, Harry.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hockey terminology:
> 
> Bubble - Slang for a plastic face shield on a hockey helmet. Outside the NHL and other sizeable high-level professional leagues, these are worn by children and by many players in the NWHL, and also for low-level games of beer league or pickup hockey. In the NHL and the KHL, these are worn by players with head and face injuries.
> 
> Department of Player Safety - Usually abbreviated as DoPS. The name implies that their job is to look after the safety and health of the players in the NHL. However, they are _absolutely god damn worthless at it._ Almost all of the injuries the Kraken are playing through in this fic during the Stanley Cup Playoffs are ones that Bruins players suffered and still played through during the playoffs in 2019. Groin injuries, jaw fractures, concussions... and there will be more coming up in later chapters. The DoPS will reliably do absolutely nothing to fix this situation.
> 
> No-contact jersey - Usually a specific color of practice jersey which means that hits/checks/etc against that player are strictly forbidden in order to avoid worsening an injury.
> 
> Partial muscle tear - Pretty much exactly what it sounds like. I've had one of these, they took x-rays and saw nothing wrong with my hip joint and so surmised it was a partial muscle tear. The first couple nights with this injury I was just sitting in my recliner in the living room with ice packs piled up on my junk wondering how the hell I would make it all twenty feet to my bedroom to go to sleep.


	39. Second Round Vs. Canucks, Game 6

The infamous bubble - Harry has only had to wear one once, way back when he was a Hab, because a Bruins D-man broke his nose and he actually needed reconstructive surgery for it. Thankfully, it healed fine and you can’t even tell by looking that it happened, but that was a very long six weeks where his vision and depth perception were all fucked up by this clear plastic _thing_ in front of his face. Even when he was a kid, he had a metal face-cage instead of a bubble, which was less intrusive.

Now, Dale and Ed are both in bubbles. Dale doesn’t technically need one, but Harry demanded that the medics make him wear it so that he can’t get hit in the face and risk worsening his concussion. It also has a positive side-effect that he’s no longer able to easily scratch holes in his cheek through his beard.

Ed, unlike Dale, looks a lot more obviously injured under his bubble - there are short spots in his beard where they had to shave to make incisions for putting all the plates and screws in and his jaws have been wired shut for the time being, so one of the staff is hanging out near the bench to hand him a special water bottle with a straw so that he can squirt it into his mouth more easily.

So far, nothing’s gone horrifically wrong, thank god. Dale and Andy both have shorter shifts than normal, but the team’s been picking up the slack. It’s 1-0 and they’re about to start the 2nd, and Harry’s feeling hopeful. He wants, so much, for this to be the last game before they move on to the Western Conference Final. Hopefully it’ll be the Jets and not the Avs - those guys are having their own game six tomorrow night.

The going strategy for right now is to send the checking line against the Canucks’ first line to wear down the energy of the enemy leadership, their fourth lines have been butting heads, and the Kraken’s first and second lines have been taking turns against the Canuck’s second and checking lines.

“Oh, god dammit!” Harry groans as a Canucks D-man gets a delay-of-game penalty for winging the puck up over the glass and into the stands.

Their power play is still awful and everyone knows it. And then Gordon decides to screw with things instead of sending one of the regular power play units.

“Ed, Mike, Bobby, Harry, Hawk, go.” He slaps each of their shoulders as he says their names and then stabs a finger towards the faceoff circle in the attacking end.

Three D-men and two forwards is a really weird setup for a power play, but Gordon is the head coach and Harry trusts him. Clearly a normal power play unit doesn’t work for them, they might as well go completely off the wall. Harry positions himself for puck-drop with a left wing and a D-man on his right hand side and two other D-men at his back. It should be Dale at his arm, but Dale’s on the bench, resting up and probably feeling dizzy but pretending he’s fine.

Harry doesn’t win the faceoff, but Mike body-checks the Canuck that catches the puck, _hard._ It’s then sent to Ed, to Bobby, to Harry, back to Mike, to Hawk. Hawk saucer-passes it to Harry and Harry takes a shot, but it goes springing off a leg pad and the five of them rearrange after Ed scrambles to recover it. It ping-pongs a little more, they’re wasting time and Harry knows it. They haven’t scored on their last fifteen power plays and this one isn’t looking any different. A partial shift change for the Kraken: the third D-pair takes over for Mike and Ed, and when Harry goes to pass to Hawk it’s Dale who’s there waiting for him. He’s been on the ice for about seven seconds when he catches this pass and slaps it into the net beside the Canucks’ goalie’s head.

No goal horn, since this game is on enemy ice, but they celebrate like they always do except a little more careful not to bang on Dale’s helmet. Instead they pat their gloves on his arms and shoulders, and Harry gently rests a palm on top of his head for a second, which just makes Dale’s smile even brighter behind the face shield.

Up by two so far, on a goal from Bobby and now one from Dale. Their checking line takes the ice for the next faceoff and Harry sits with his arm across his boyfriend’s shoulders, which he’s sure about a thousand pictures of will be all over Twitter before the game is even through.

The next few minutes are pretty unproductive for both teams. The Kraken get another power play when a stick bounces off of Ed’s bubble which they of course don’t score on. The Canucks steal two breakaways which are stopped dead by Albert. Harry gets a fighting major against Jean Renault and watches from the sin-bin as the other team is equally worthless at their man-advantage as his guys are.

8:29 left in the 2nd - Harry comes charging out of the box to catch a pass from Dale and runs up the ice with it, narrowly avoiding getting slew-footed by an opposing D-man and slapping the puck off the boards to indirectly pass to Dale… who gets his second of the night on the glove-side.

Harry grabs onto him for a hug and immediately feels that something isn’t right; Dale hugs back, but loosely, his arms slipping a little. His smile is too tense, his eyes are dulled. They skate back to the bench and bump gloves with everyone on the way by like always. Sitting, Harry squirts some Gatorade into his mouth and then prepares to ask Dale what’s wrong.

He doesn’t get the chance. As soon as the thought even crosses Harry’s mind, Dale is ripping his helmet off as fast as he can and then pitching over the bench wall - he throws up all over the ice and immediately collapses once he’s done. Harry catches him, drags him up again, sure that play hasn’t even resumed yet and someone will be over to clean up the mess while half-carrying him down the tunnel to the quiet room.

“I’m sorry,” Dale gasps, stumbling and clinging to Harry. “I’m sorry…”

“No, that was a good goal,” he says, aiming to distract.

“But now I can’t keep playing…”

“Coop, we’ll be fine, I promise. I want you to just relax in the quiet room for a little bit, okay? You got us up to three, you don’t have to get a dick-trick every game.”

Harry kisses his temple before leaving him in the quiet room with the medical trainers and heading back to the bench. The second line and the third D-pair is on, so he wasn’t missed.

“Will he stay off the ice?” Gordon asks as he sits.

Harry shrugs. “Pending reevaluation at the start of the 3rd. God, I hope they keep him off, he shouldn’t have been on in the first place.”

“He got us two goals,” Gordon points out.

Harry glowers at him. “Chief, I’m not really interested in risking my boyfriend’s _life_ for one damn hockey game!”

The whole bench stares at Harry and he realizes he said that a lot louder than he meant to, and they both shut up after that. The last few minutes of the 2nd are uneventful aside from Ed really getting his money’s worth out of that bubble, because without it he would’ve gotten beamed in the face with a puck _again._

“We’re doing well,” Gordon says from his usual place at the center of the locker room. “We’re keeping the puck away from them, and usually we’re keeping them away from Albert. You fellas have been doing a pretty thorough job of compensating for injured teammates, too, and most of you have been adapting well to some impromptu line-changes. I don’t feel the need to say much else, except to keep up the good work through the 3rd and after this we’re on to the conference final.”

They head back onto the ice, minus Dale, who’s still in the quiet room with the medics. The Canucks are starting to look desperate and demoralized, the Kraken have been stopping them cold at every turn. From the bench, Harry shares a look with Albert, who’s pulled up his facemask so he can squirt water into his mouth. _Don’t let them score, it’ll give them hope and we don’t need that,_ Harry thinks as hard as he can. Albert’s impatient glare answers: _Fuck you, Harry, I know what I’m doing, don’t lecture me._

Harry smiles in spite of himself and looks back towards the center line for puck drop.

The Kraken are a wall for the first ten minutes of the 3rd, always beating the opposing team into the neutral or attacking zones, not even letting them close enough to see Albert’s eyes behind his helmet. At 9:47 on the clock, Harry feels a shuffling movement by his hip and turns to find Dale back on the bench, who gives him a big smile and a thumbs-up. And Harry almost forgets the concussion for a second, because seeing this strikes him with the sudden urge to bury the Canucks once and for all. No hope to dig themselves back out. A three-goal lead is difficult but not technically impossible. But a four-nothing score with less than ten minutes left? Pretty much insurmountable.

Play stops for an offside call and Harry’s line takes the faceoff right outside their own zone. Across from him stands a player whose beard will get shaved off tonight, and that’s the last thought he has before he’s smacking the puck backwards between his own feet to Mike - after that, it’s all instinct. They don’t charge up right away, instead the five of them trade passes in the neutral zone for a little bit, trying to get the Canucks all wrong-footed. It comes to Harry, and he sees their chance so he hits it to Dale and they take off, his winger just slightly ahead of him. Dale throws the puck back and Harry slaps it towards the gap between the leg pads.

It goes in.

They’re up by four, now, and bodies crash into him, hands on his head and chest and back, slapping congratulations on an absolutely _gorgeous_ goal that deep down he wasn’t sure he could make because he’s never been a sniper by any means. As if he would ever admit that to his guys. He takes all the bumping and thumping, then skates back with them in a line after him and wearing a big smile.

The Canucks get frantic after that and start making even more mistakes, which the Kraken’s second and checking lines take almost surgically precise advantage of to keep them penned into their own zone. By this point it’s barely even a hockey game anymore… it’s a lot closer to a butchering. The Canucks can’t pull through this one and the Kraken are viciously finishing them off.

The horn finally goes and the bench empties so they can all mob Albert like usual, tapping sticks and heads together because despite their goalie’s crankiness they’re glad they have him and they never want him to go. Harry jokingly bops Albert’s face-cage with the bulky knuckles of his left glove and as he skates away again the blade of the goalie stick whacks him on the ass in reply.

They line up and shake hands with their opponents, then head for the locker room. Harry thinks fast and tosses his stick aside, putting his hands up over his head. “Hey, HEY!” They all look at him. “Before we give over our helmets, remember that my boyfriend has a concussion, be gentle. Thank you.”

The Gatorade is rounded up and the helmets are gathered to be taped shut… except Dale’s, which is pulled off his head and set aside on the bench. They do Gordon first, then Albert, then take the bubble off Ed’s helmet so they can do him, then Harry. Finally Mike and Bobby open the tops of two bottles instead of removing them entirely and squeeze as hard as they can to douse Dale’s face and chest. He stumbles a little, probably in surprise, but Harry catches him.

They’re going to the conference final.

Harry’s only been to a conference final once before.

This time, he won’t let the other team wipe the walls with his guys.

This time, he won’t let anything stop them.

They’re going to bring home the Stanley Cup.

That’s all there is to it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hockey terminology:
> 
> Conference final - The third round of playoffs. (After the two conference finals is the Stanley Cup Final, in which the Eastern Conference Champion and the Western Conference Champion square off to bring home the Cup.)
> 
> Delay-of-game - This is one of those things that sounds more simple than it actually is... it can be kind of subjective to call, for one thing, and for another thing if the ref is especially mean they could call it on some very stupid shit. Most delay-of-game infractions happen when a player wings the puck over the glass at the sides of the arena, which 90% of the time happens by accident. You can also get one for arguing with the ref, among other things. In general, an annoying infraction which is a huge pain in the ass for everyone involved.
> 
> Face-cage - A rounded metal grid that protects the face of a player. Usually worn by children/college students, sometimes in the NWHL. (Personally, being that I'm _not_ a professional player, I chose a face-cage over a bubble because I'm sorry but I do not fucking trust a sheet of plastic to protect me from a hockey puck.)
> 
> Saucer pass - So called because the puck goes sailing through the air instead of shooting across the ice, vaguely resembling a flying saucer.
> 
> A note on Gordon's line of reasoning for the unusual power play setup: he figured, apparently correctly, that having three D-men present would be able to buffer against breakaways and keep the puck in the attacking zone for the two forwards. This would probably not ever happen in real life, but this is not only a fic but also the playoffs, so weird shit is pretty much guaranteed anyway. It's not that far of a step from what some coaches have actually done to try and get closer to the Stanley Cup Final.


	40. Win Conditions

“No, no, _no,_ dammit, get up!” Harry screams, about ready to throw his dinner plate at his tv. Play has stopped and the camera is zoomed in on Frank, who’s bent over double holding his stomach before fully collapsing onto the ice.

“I think by this point it’s safe to say we know it won’t be the Bolts in the Eastern Conference Final,” Albert remarks in a grumpy tone with a nod to the screen.

“God fucking dammit,” Harry says, shaking his head.

Albert is right and they all know it - it’s halfway through the 2nd and the Bruins are on top 5-1 while Harry’s brother is carried off the ice. Hawk and Dale watch in silence, both still eating like it doesn’t bother them even though it obviously does. It’s not a complicated situation to grasp… the Flyers and the Islanders are facing off for their game seven tomorrow night, with half the Isles’ roster down for the count and so replaced with AHL callups. The Flyers are going to obliterate them and then in the Eastern Conference Final the Bruins, missing captain notwithstanding, are going to eat the Flyers alive and only stop to pick shreds of orange jerseys out of their teeth before heading to the fourth round against the Kraken.

“Take a look at this,” Hawk says, offering his phone from the left end of the couch.

Harry takes it and bristles.

“Great… y’know, what the hell is even the point of having the DoPS if they’re gonna allow shit like this?” he gripes, glaring down at the article.

Earle, the Avs’ top goon, got a one-game suspension for tomorrow night’s game seven against the Jets. Both teams are horrifically injured like the Isles, but the Avs are pound-for-pound a much meaner and uglier bunch of guys to face off against, so the Jets will get stomped into paste and then Harry’s team will have to crush their way through to get to the final. But just a one-game suspension for Earle… he should be out for the rest of his team’s run for his behavior last night and somehow isn’t. Which means he’s going to come after Dale, he’s going to go after Harry while he’s at it, and god only knows how many of their teammates will also fall victim to that short, vicious bastard… leaving them more vulnerable to the Bruins later on.

“Harry, I’m concerned,” Dale says, shifting how he’s sitting on the right end of the couch. (Harry is stuck in the middle between him and Hawk while Albert sits in the chair with his weird vegan food.) “There is a very strong possibility of facing Boston in the Final.”

“Yeah, I was just thinking that,” Harry admits. “We’re in for a rough time.”

“Not necessarily, there’s still a slim chance that Philly will be able to stop them,” Albert suggests. It’s the most positive thing Harry’s ever heard him say about _anything._

“How many times did you have to play them when you were with the Flyers, Cooper?” Hawk wonders.

“I’m not sure, but it’s a high number. Generally speaking the Bruins are much more hostile to the Penguins than to the Flyers, but of course they are still the Bruins. They hit like a train but also maintain a high level of skill, which is to be expected from Original Six teams. Winning against them was always extremely satisfying and a hard-fought victory at the very least.”

“That’s always the problem with them,” Albert complains. “They take skill players and turn them into brawlers. Even their snipers have always been goons.”

“When I was with Montreal and we played them, I swear to god the entire game would have at least one guy boxed. There was almost never five-on-five because we were too busy beating the shit outta each other to actually play the game sometimes,” Harry recalls. “It’s actually where I learned to fight, when I was with Columbus it didn’t happen nearly as much for me and I sucked at it.”

On the tv, the Bolts manage to score somehow bringing it to 5-2… and almost immediately after that the Bruins get up to six. The camera zooms in on the goal-scorer - it’s this really short player, a baby-faced kid who _has_ to be an AHL callup wearing the number 6 and a long German-looking last name on his jersey. All of his teammates are at least half a foot taller than him and he looks like he can’t be more than fourteen years old, somehow. In all three games against the Bruins, Harry’s never seen that guy before, and it just looks weird to have such a short player on a line with guys who average six feet tall.

“The Bolts are done for,” Harry says needlessly.

“Think your brother’ll be okay?” Hawk asks.

“Yeah, he’ll probably call me tomorrow to bitch about it.”

The mood of the room is a little crankier now but they all keep eating anyway.

“The Bruins are captainless,” Albert reminds them. “They have at least three callups from Providence more or less permanently assigned to their roster until the end of the playoffs. Those conditions don’t make for a team that wins the Stanley Cup. All of our original roster are up and playing, and we have half as many active injuries as they do.”

“Yeah, that’s gonna change if and when we face Colorado, though,” Harry points out darkly. “Them and their pet goon.”

“The fact that his presence in the NHL is still suffered by the DoPS is frightening,” Dale agrees.

“Hey Coop, what actually happened between you and Earle?” Hawk wonders.

“Well, at the time he played for Pittsburgh, not Colorado. He was traded at the end of the following season when his contract expired and I believe it was in part due to him deliberately breaking my ribs and causing me to suffer a punctured lung. I was hospitalized and required surgery for the injury.”

“So the rib-breaking thing isn’t unique to me?” Harry guesses.

“Not at all. It’s one of his favorite moves.”

“That’s just great.”

“My advice, Harry, would be to send Bobby Briggs and the checking line after him. Those four may actually be capable of winning a fight against Earle.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At the risk of giving away something that's probably really fucking obviously gonna happen later on in the story, keep your eye out for the tiny Bruin wearing the number 6 to pop up again a couple more times... BECAUSE IF DAVID LYNCH CAN HAVE CAMEOS IN HIS WORK, SO CAN I, GOD DAMMIT!!!!!! :D


	41. Conference Final Vs. Avalanche, Game 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alternatively could be titled "dammit, Harry, be more careful what you wish for." Also, sorry this one is so short. I'm getting fed up by now and I just want to get through this round of playoffs.
> 
> Why yes, this chapter _is_ up a couple hours later than usual because the finale of _Supernatural_ just fucking hate-crimed me! Sorry for the delay. Had I known, I would've skipped watching that and the chapter would've been up on time. Cheers fellas.

The end of the 2nd sees a 1-0 score that’s not in their favor and Bobby now joining Ed and Dale’s bubble-club with a broken nose as well as an instigator penalty even though Earle was the one who actually started that fight. This brings their injury count up to six, because Mike almost fell victim to the same trick that fucking goon used to down Harry near the end of the regular season. Very fortunately, he escaped with bruises only, and that’s what led to Bobby throwing hands and getting his own face busted up for the trouble.

“We need to get rid of him,” Harry grumbles to Hawk, leaning into his stall a little. “Something’s gotta happen. _Anything._ Earle needs to go and not come back for the rest of the series. This is ridiculous.”

“I don’t know if there’s much we can do, anyone who can fight’s already been hurt by him,” Hawk points out.

Dale says what they’re all thinking, probably not even realizing they’re all thinking it: “I have a bad feeling about this.”

“Coop, you’re jinxing us,” Harry groans, even though Dale’s right and he knows it.

They move to the 3rd. Harry has a bad feeling about things, too. Maybe it’s because virtually a third of the roster is now hurt in some way, maybe it’s because the refs have been massively inconsistent in their calls all game so far… and definitely because Earle is still somehow allowed to play on this ice.

Harry only realizes too late that Earle beating up on whatever Kraken player is in reach actually covers up the real strategy: decapitate the leadership.

It’s a sequence of things. First, Harry gets cross-checked hard into the boards so that he bounces off them and goes sprawling, which means he’s not in any position to stop what happens next. Then, from the very little he actually sees, Earle looks almost like he’s bracing for a check, except deliberately still moving forward… and rams as hard as he can right into Dale’s chest. Harry doesn’t wait around to watch Dale finish falling, he scrambles back up on his skates and rushes over while flinging his gloves to either side.

He doesn’t land a single punch. Knuckles ream into his jaw, and then pain explodes in his side as Earle’s fist slams into his broken ribs. Harry also drops, he can’t hear anything, every breath in he takes is a stabbing agony on the left side of his chest. Did they not give him enough of the anesthetic? Why did he actually feel it? He should be okay…

Harry and Dale are both carried off the ice. Harry stays with the medical trainers, but Dale is rushed away to the hospital with oxygen tubes stuffed up his nose.

“What happened? Why are they taking him?” Harry demands.

“He wasn’t breathing correctly,” Will explains. “It’s an unusual injury, I’ve never seen that before.”

“Is he gonna be okay?”

“Hopefully. It’s hard to say not knowing how he’s injured.”

Harry is forced to sit out for the rest of the game, which ends as a 1-0 loss. There is a tiny fragment of good news: Earle, at last, has been punished. He was ejected from the game, he’s been suspended for the remaining games of the current playoffs round, and they slapped him with a massive fine. There will be no more Earle in the days to come.

Harry also goes to the hospital, but he has no intention of getting his ribs looked at again. Instead he hassles the staff to tell him where his boyfriend is until finally they decide to help him. It’s late, no visitors right now because Dale’s not critical and he hasn’t had surgery… yet. His sternum is fractured, they’re going to put pins and screws and things in to hold the bone together so that it’ll heal faster. And Harry has an awful feeling about it because he knows, he _knows,_ that Dale will insist on playing through this, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hockey terminology:
> 
> Cross-check - An illegal check where you shove them using the handle of your stick. The stick is horizontal and you have a hand on either end, and the section between your hands is what hits your opponent. A minor infraction worth two minutes in the sin-bin.


	42. Conference Final Vs. Avalanche, Game 3

Lucy pulls him aside for the first intermission.

“Harry, how has your team been coping with the injury count so far?”

He fidgets slightly with the towel draped across the back of his neck and tries to stop panting like a dog - he just barely got off the ice.

“Uh, we’re doing our best,” he says, then realizes how lame that sounds. “Some of the guys have to have a little less time on ice so they don’t get hurt worse. We’re getting by, we’ll make it through.”

“You and Coop were both scratched for game two.”

“Yeah, uh, he had surgery, uh, surgery on his chest, and uh, Gordon wanted me to rest up for a bit. Good thing Ed and Hawk are mostly okay, we still pulled in a win, uh, Coop’s doing alright so far all things considered. I didn’t want him playing tonight after he was on the table two days ago, but, y’know, it’s the playoffs, you can’t scratch an A right now unless his arms and legs get hacked off or something. I’ve been doing okay, they do the nerve-block still on my ribs, so I can’t feel anything.”

“Walk us through your goal from earlier?”

“Which one?” he grins.

“The second one.”

“Okay. So I don’t really know how else to say it except I got lucky, y’know, I’m not the fastest guy on the team usually so a breakaway’s not that common for me. And, uh, when you take a shot, you can usually kinda tell right away if it’s gonna go in or not, but I didn’t think that one would make it. Good thing it did, though.”

“Okay, thank you, Harry.”

“Thank you.”

Harry wipes his face and head dry over the walk to the locker room and tosses the towel in the bucket as he comes in. Sitting in his borrowed stall, he takes a long gulp of purple Gatorade just as Gordon starts talking.

“We’re off to a good head start here, fellas. Coop, try not to overextend yourself so much, if you stay out there past your shift one more time I’m benching you. We don’t want you suddenly dropping dead out there.”

“Yes, I understand.”

 _Do you?_ Harry wonders silently as he swallows.

“Bobby, Mike, you two have been exceptional tonight so far, let’s see if we can’t keep your momentum going for the next two periods. Harry, I have the same problem with you as I do with Coop, you’re pushing yourself way too hard through your injury. That goal was beautiful, but try not to take so many hits, we don’t need you ending up with any more broken ribs.”

“Got it, chief,” he agrees, even though he knows he’ll do no such thing.

“Albert, phenomenal work as always, don’t be so grumpy.”

“No promises,” Albert grunts before taking a hit off his water bottle.

“We can see the difference even more than we did in game two,” Gordon continues. “Without their lead goon, the Avs are forced back into the realm of reasonable strategies around offense and defense. Second and checking lines, I want you to focus as much as you can on man-to-man coverage when we’re on the defensive. First line, you’re playing zone instead, try not to overexert yourselves… Hawk, this goes without saying, you’ll probably have to pick up a little bit of the slack. Fourth line, concentrate on your forecheck a little more.”

They head out onto the ice for the 2nd with the checking line and third D-pair starting. The score is 3-1 so far and Harry would love to get a hat trick if he can, not only because that’s something he’s done maybe twice over his entire career but also just to spite these fuckers for letting (encouraging) one of their teammates to deliberately give his boyfriend a life-threatening injury.

Bobby gets a fighting major five minutes into the period, which means Ed, Andy, Harry and Dale are sent to kick off the penalty kill. Harry shoves an opponent off the puck and runs into the neutral zone with it, but Dale isn’t open so he passes to Ed instead. Ed holds out until he’s a second away from getting mobbed and finally the puck finds its way to Dale, who takes off at top speed and puts them up 4-1 because at this point it would be surprising if he _didn’t_ automatically score when they’re a man short on the ice.

Things get boring after that. The Avs apparently have no idea what they’re doing without their chief asshole darting around smashing Kraken players, and the adapting strategies are coming to them too slow. So the puck is forever bouncing back and forth up the ice, never staying in a zone for more than thirty seconds, and most of the play stoppages are coming from offsides and icing calls. Harry isn’t able to score a third goal and get himself a hat-trick… maybe he will in the 3rd.

The medical trainers give him and Dale quick check-ups during the second intermission and they both pass reevaluation and are cleared to continue play, which Harry has mixed feelings about. Dale should not be on the ice, he has two injuries which could possibly kill him if he gets hit wrong, but there’s no dissuading him.

The 3rd - they’re up by three goals, but they’re also a hurt team, so they can’t get overconfident about things. Short, careful shifts - the Kraken bench has a revolving door of players. Somehow, they maintain a cohesive defense structure even while doing this, although their scoring chances drop to almost zero as a tradeoff. Albert’s expression under his facemask has graduated from bored and irritated to straight up annoyed by now, but he’s still more than pulling his weight, shutting down every Avs player that gets near him with a level of precision they’ve come to expect and rely on over the last eight months.

The game ends on one of their worthless-ass power plays after the Avs get a tripping call, and Andy is pulled aside for the interview. Harry’s just glad he and Lucy finally got their shit sorted out, because now Andy is a lot less distracted… he barely has any brainpower as it is and all of it needs to be free right now.

“Harry, when we finish defeating Colorado and go to the Cup Final, I’m going to celebrate by eating an entire can of whipped cream,” Dale announces on the bus back to the hotel.

Harry laughs. “Why whipped cream?”

“Oh, it’s tradition,” he explains. “Albert can confirm this. I’ve been to two Finals in my career, and when I was a child my mother would always squirt the whipped cream right into her mouth from the can but never let me do it. So in defiance of her, I’ve taken to indulging myself with this absurd reward each time I achieve a major victory.”

Harry frowns. “But Coop, you’ve done that both times you went to the Final with Philly. And neither time that you went to the Final did you actually bring the Cup home with you. So maybe you shouldn’t do that this year, you might jinx us.”

“Oh,” Dale sulks. “I’m not entirely sure how this affront to the hockey gods has escaped my attention… you’re right, Harry. I won’t do it again.”

“I’m sorry, Coop.”

“It’s alright.”

“Y’know, I’ve never even been to a Cup Final,” Harry says, trying to cheer him up.

“You haven’t?”

“Nope. Not with Columbus, not with Montreal, not with Seattle. I’ve _never_ been to a Cup Final before. This’ll be my first one.”

“A good time to get your first Stanley Cup win, then,” Dale smiles.

“Ah, a good time would’a been that year that Chicago kicked our ass in the third round,” Harry gripes. “But this one’ll do, too. Better late than never.”

“Think of it this way, Harry. The first time either of us will have won a Stanley Cup it’ll be with each other,” he points out.

Harry grins and nods. “Yeah. That’ll be nice, too.”

Back at the hotel, they put on pajamas (or sweatpants, in Harry’s case) and he wraps Dale up in bandages because Dale somehow forgot… maybe he was too busy thinking about cans of whipped cream when he got out of the shower earlier. And apparently this is just an omen for what happens a few minutes later. The anesthetics wear off, which means Dale is lying on the bed in so much pain he’s in tears while Harry frantically dials up room service to ask for bags of ice cubes. Harry digs up the bottle of extra-strength Tylenol out of Dale’s luggage and feeds him three of them and a glass of water, then makes him lie back into a mound of pillows and gently piles up the ice bags in the middle of his chest to hopefully numb the incision site.

“See, this is why I didn’t want you to play,” Harry murmurs, stroking the hair of a still-sniffling Dale. “It’s not to punish you or anything, you’re just hurt real bad and I worry a lot.”

“I’m going to be on the ice for game four,” Dale insists with a wet face and a shaking voice.

“There’s screws holding your chest together.”

“Thank you, Harry, I’m already well aware of that.”

Harry sighs and kisses his boyfriend’s shoulder through the pajama shirt, then looks back at the tv, which is on NBCSN. Of course they’re talking about the playoffs, right now going on about the Eastern Conference Final - the Bruins have won the first two games against the Flyers, but last night the Flyers took game three with a 2-1 victory. Tomorrow night will be their game four in Philadelphia. They start in on a breakdown of the teams and their talent; Dale points out friends when they pop up, talking over the sportscaster about things he enjoyed from playing with them.

The report moves on to the Bruins’ first line… some Czech guy with a busted nose at center, then two Canadians on either wing. The lefty is that short kid Harry noticed when the Bruins were thrashing the Bolts for the last time. Five-foot-four, all of a hundred and fifty pounds, this shrimp from Quebec Province has the third-most PIM for the Bruins in the regular season despite constantly missing games due to injury.

Some reporter interviews him - he chews gum through the whole thing.

“Have you been to a conference final before?”

“Nope. I was called up from Providence off and on for a little bit, this is my first season full-time in Boston. I’m excited.”

“Your team was first in the league at the end of the regular season, what were your biggest challenges getting there?”

“I mean, y’know, when your **bleep** captain pretty much drops dead in the middle of a rivalry game with the **bleep** Habs, that’s a pretty big problem, eh?” the shrimp shrugs. “And I mean. The President’s Trophy curse. We were really **bleep** worried aboot that, too. But I mean, Philly’s more hurt than us, I guess the trades they made this season weren’t good ones or something. I think we got a really good shot, whoever comes over from the Western Conference is gonna have a tough time here. We’ll have home ice for games one and two.”

“How does it feel being on the first line for the playoffs, especially since this is officially your first season with the Boston Bruins?”

“It’s great… I thought I’d be second or checking or something. I’m more like I guess a defensive forward, I don’t score that often, but Patrice put me on the first line, it’s a huge honor. I do what I can to live up to that.”

“Alright, we have a question for you from the fans: they want to know about your pregame superstitions.”

“Mine personally or the team’s?”

“Yours personally.”

“Oh. Okay, um, so like I always have this one really specific song on my phone that I listen to while I’m dressing for the game. And sometimes I go back and watch clips from the last game, it helps get in the mindset that I’m aboot to be on the ice, I get ready to take some hits and get in some fights, maybe actually score a goal once in awhile too obviously,” he laughs.

“Okay, Aaron, thank you so much.”

“Yeah, thank you.”

 _That’s the face of the enemy,_ Harry thinks to himself. That little French shrimp with a stupid last name who chews gum. Harry just knows he’s gonna end up fighting this puny bastard by the end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hockey terminology:
> 
> Aboot - Canadian for "about".
> 
> Eh - Can be used to confirm a thought, among other things. Always tagged to the end of a sentence and common to Canadian vernacular. However, in real life, I was born/grew up in the US and don't use it that much. (I do say aboot though.)
> 
> Forecheck - A defensive play made in the offensive zone with the objective of applying pressure to the opposing team to regain control of the puck. The level of aggression it uses varies depending on the playstyle of the skaters and on the direction of the head coach.
> 
> President's Trophy - An award given to the team with the best overall record during the regular season.
> 
> President's Trophy curse - A superstition that this award is unlucky and gets the team that wins it eliminated early on in the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
> 
> So for the record, me popping up as Bruins player is in fact leading to something and it's not for ego reasons. I promise when it happens, everything will be explained in the notes on that chapter, and probably most of you will agree with me that it's gratifying in a weird meta way. Also, yes, I am in fact making fun of my own accent :)


	43. Conference Final Vs. Avalanche, Game 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For my US readers, please stay safe this Black Friday by _not_ going to a bunch of god damn stores and getting yourselves sick. Trust me, it's not worth it.

“Okay, everybody start all together, ready?” Harry yells. “One, two, _three!_ ”

At once the whole team is deliberately breaking their sticks. Some smack them against floors or walls, others just put weight on them until they crack. Harry stomps on his with the blade guard of his skate to get it to snap in half. Twenty destroyed sticks, including one from each goalie, are piled in the center of the locker room and a bottle of Gatorade is dumped over them. The sacrifice to the hockey gods is complete (the equipment staff have agreed beforehand to clean this up while they’re out on the ice for the 1st). Helmets go on, they all tap some part of Albert, and then they head up the tunnel and into the arena. Game five, home ice, and if they win tonight the round ends and they move to the Stanley Cup Final.

“Second line, first D-pair,” Gordon orders, pointing to center ice.

“Remember: no whipped cream,” Harry insists, holding up a finger.

“Alright,” Dale sighs mournfully.

Passing the two minute mark, it’s already obvious that the Avs are going to choke. Their offense collapses with the lightest poke, their defense is disorganized, and the only reason the Kraken haven’t scored fifteen times by the middle of the 1st is because the opposing goalie is working his ass off to stop them.

“Over, over!” Harry bellows. Immediately he receives a pass as his line changes on.

The five of them ladder it up the ice through the neutral zone before carrying it in, doing the ping-pong routine for a second just to disorient the Avs even more. Dale hits it to Harry and Harry smacks it in over the leg-pad, and the goal horn sounds overhead.

The stick-sacrifice to the hockey gods must’ve been the right move, because the 1st ends with a 2-0 lead for the Kraken and once the 2nd period starts the _real_ slaughter begins. The Avs are panicking, constantly getting penalties called on them while Dale buries two more goals with pretty much minimal effort. It would almost be sad if Harry wasn’t so giddy, and he also wouldn’t feel bad for them anyway because aside from the obvious reasons their entire strategy at the beginning boiled down to “murder Kraken players to make them less effective” and he really doesn’t appreciate that.

The 3rd kicks off with Mike getting slew-footed and immediately beating the living shit out of the guy who does it, so they’re doing 4-on-4 for a little bit, which at least shakes things up and keeps it interesting. Harry gets lucky on a shot from the left circle and puts them up to five goals, assisted by Andy. The Campbell trophy is in sight for the Kraken, and after that - the Stanley Cup itself.

Harry actually feels a fresh adrenalin surge when the horn goes at the end of the 3rd… they’re going to the Final.

_The Kraken is going to the Stanley Cup Final._

The thumping and bumping commences, all of his teammates are yelling at the tops of their lungs, slapping the helmets and shoulders of him and then Albert, because they’re going to the fucking Stanley Cup Final for the first time in fifteen years… longer than Harry has been captain or even part of the team. He smiles until his mouth hurts, and coming up to the goal even gets _hugged_ by _Albert,_ who is _grinning._ The situation is huge and almost seems impossible now that he’s finally arrived here. He can’t believe it. He and his guys are playing game one next week.

They line up to shake hands with their crushed opponents, then stay gathered on the ice, the crowd still watching, while the Campbell trophy and the stack of Western Conference Champions snapbacks are brought out for them. Bobby and Mike wear theirs backwards, Harry knows he would have a hell of a time stuffing all his curls into his baseball cap if they weren’t still matted down from being under his helmet, Dale frantically finger-combs his own hair before tugging the hat on and compulsively straightening the bill for at least twenty seconds.

They gather around the trophy, careful not to touch it, and pictures are taken: first all of them together like that, and then smaller ones, guys being goofy on the ice for a minute in their dumb snapback hats with giant smiles on their faces. Harry, normally very reserved and private about the subject when it comes to the media, finally lets them get a picture of him kissing his boyfriend, hats switched backwards to be out of the way and hugging each other at the same time.

The locker room is buzzing as everyone floods into it. Not a regular dumping, because this is a special moment - no, this time it’s actually _worse._ First a bottle of Gatorade is deliberately poured down Gordon’s back under his suit jacket, probably ruining the dress shirt underneath. Then Harry, Dale, Albert and Ed are all grabbed by the arms and held still while bottles of the sticky sports drink are stuffed into the necks of their jerseys and drained. And immediately afterwards all the empty bottles are scooped up and pegged at the four of them.

And they…

…they’re…

…they’re going to the Stanley Cup Final.

For the first time in Harry’s career.

Fucking hell, it’s really happening.

He’s still not sure he believes it, but god, he’s never been happier.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hockey terminology:
> 
> Campbell trophy - Award given to the overall winners of the Western Conference; the equivalent in the Eastern Conference is the Prince of Whales trophy. These are given to the teams who will face each other during the Stanley Cup Final and superstition dictates that for hockey players to actually touch this trophy is extremely unlucky, because if you touch it then you clearly think that touching the Stanley Cup itself is not special enough which is a _massive_ affront to the hockey gods.


	44. Jellyfish Heaven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a little bit of sex in this chapter, but it's nothing too graphic and it's only a few sentences.

They stand still together under the hot water for awhile, just holding each other, and occasionally one of them will plant a kiss on the other one’s skin. There’s something magical about hotel showers that makes Harry never want to get out of them, especially now that he’s sometimes in them with Dale. He makes sure he doesn’t move Dale around too much, though… his boyfriend’s back has to stay facing the water because the incision site is still very sore.

“I enjoyed the jellyfish,” Dale comments absently, face resting in the crook of Harry’s neck.

He starts to laugh. “Coop, the only thing you _saw_ was the jellyfish!”

Which is true. They flew into Boston last night and today after practice the two of them spent the afternoon at the aquarium… specifically, at the jellyfish tank. Dale stood there the entire time and stared at those damn things, not saying a word for once and barely even blinking. It kinda reminded Harry of something Joey would probably do so he didn’t interfere, just waited nearby for Dale to get bored and snap out of it, which never actually happened. They left three and a half hours later because Harry was too hungry to stay any longer, and as they walked around Boston looking for this one Italian restaurant Harry discovered several years ago Dale just wouldn’t shut up about the fucking jellyfish, trying to find the most precise word to describe the way that they moved.

“They’re fascinating organisms, Harry. Their entire being and structure could be most closely compared to cellular activity… they’re giant cells.”

“Your pillow talk needs work, Dale.”

“Sorry.”

Harry chuckles and kisses the corner of his jaw. “It’s okay. I’m glad you had fun.”

Dale somehow finds a way to fold into him even closer with a quiet sigh.

“Harry.”

“Hmm.”

“At any prior point in my life when I’ve found myself in a museum or zoo or aquarium or some such establishment of similar design, the party I was with whether an individual or group would quickly become frustrated with my tendency to fixate on a single exhibit. Ultimately I would be dragged away to observe other things that I was less interested in. I want you to know that I appreciate more than I can say how patient you were this afternoon and that I in no way consider your need for a meal unreasonable. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” He twists his neck a little so he can kiss the spot behind Dale’s ear. “You can stand there and stare at things as much as you want, I’m happy if you’re happy.”

“I love you, Harry.”

“I know, I love you, too.”

They rearrange how they’re holding each other and then indulge in lazy open-mouthed kisses for a long moment. Harry runs a palm along Dale’s back, then down further, feeling. Dale just breathes, letting this happen without complaint, starting to harden. Yes, there’s still lube, leftover from earlier and the reason they even got in the shower to begin with. It’s nothing groundbreaking or particularly special, Harry slides two fingers in and rubs on his prostate until he comes with a noise that wants to be a gasp and a moan at the same time. It all rinses down the drain after.

When they finally get out of the shower over an hour after they got into it, they take turns rubbing each other dry with fluffy white hotel towels and then get ready for bed even though they won’t probably go to sleep for another couple of hours at least. They do end up on the bed because that’s the best place to watch tv from - Harry lies on his back with an arm around Dale, who’s curled into his side, head on his chest.

Harry tries to stay relaxed. Really, he does. But the circumstances of their stay in this hotel won’t leave him alone. Tomorrow night, seven o’clock eastern daylight time, they’re facing the Boston Bruins for game one. A team they lost every match to in the regular season and which is number one in the entire NHL, a team that manages to be brutal without usually being all that dirty… a team that deep down, in some part of himself that Harry’s ashamed to admit exists, he’s scared shitless of.

But the Bruins still don’t have their captain. Two of their first line are injury-prone dipshits who’re more interested in fighting half the time than actual gameplay. They’re wearing a laundry-list of injuries, usually at least two per guy, and a third of their bench is filled with emergency callups from the AHL. The Kraken has Harry present, they’ve only got six injured skaters, their roster is intact. They absolutely have a chance to pull this off.

Harry settles a little deeper into the bed, eyes on the screen. He forces himself to think of nothing else than lying here with his boyfriend, who in turn is probably still marveling at the jellyfish.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A note on Cooper keeping his back to the water: after I had top surgery, I actually had to do this because having water droplets hit you on a spot where your body was recently cut open with super sharp knives _really fucking hurts_ as it turns out! Like the surgeon will even tell you to do this, to not face the water in the shower for like... I don't remember how many weeks because I got chopped up way back in 2018, but it was some ridiculous amount of time.


	45. Stanley Cup Final Vs. Bruins, Game 1

Their only game one not on home ice… Harry refuses to believe that will affect the outcome of the Final. His line and the second D-pair are starting, and as the national anthem plays he looks up at the ceiling to a host of retired numbers and the names of the men who wore them… 2, 3, 4, 8… almost directly above him, 33 and 37 hang together. He only knows the name attached to 37, Patrice Bergeron, because that’s the Bruin’s current head coach who’s fifty-something or maybe sixty-something years old by now. Harry can’t be bothered to remember exactly.

He imagines his own stadium at home in Seattle. They’re not an old enough team yet to have retired very many numbers, just 7 and 26. But someday, when Harry is an old man and probably has grandkids who’re playing hockey, 15 and 59 will both be up there, because Albert and Dale are too good not to have their numbers taken out of circulation. Harry’s not egotistical enough to believe that his own 46 will be in the rafters too, though.

They do a ceremonial first puck drop and then Harry shakes hands with the A who’s standing in as captain - he doesn’t want to shake hands with this Bruin, or any Bruin at all really, but it would be ridiculous and make him look awful if he refuses. Gordon shakes hands with the Bruins’ head coach as well and then Harry darts back over to where his teammates are standing. The line across from him at the center dot is the Czech guy with the busted nose, the short kid from Quebec with the German last name, and a third guy, also from Canada, who has absolutely nothing worth noting about him at all.

Harry anticipated this, though. He’s already told Bobby and Mike to clobber the two guys on the wings, which will hopefully give him and Dale an opening to shove their way through the Bruins’ current D-pair.

This plan does not go off without a hitch. Harry wins the faceoff and flicks the puck sideways to Hawk, where it’s promptly stolen right off his stick and then the Kraken are chasing it down into their own zone. A shot gets taken, Albert kicks it to Bobby, Bobby passes to Harry, who is immediately checked off the puck by a Bruins D-man and then a second shot gets taken, which Albert traps against his chest. No rebound - the whistle goes.

They change out with the checking line while Bobby and Mike stay on the ice. The game is ten seconds in and Harry’s already frustrated and angry at this damn team - he _hates_ playing them, so much that he can’t even describe it if asked. And part of that is because he knows that really boiling it down, the Bruins and the Kraken as far as team culture and chosen strategy go are almost identical. It’s just that the Bruins, generally speaking, are better at it than the Kraken is. Harry will never admit this to anyone but himself, but he’s not sure that they can beat even a crippled Bruins roster. They’ll definitely win at least a couple games in this series, but he doesn’t know that they can actually get the Cup. If it was literally any other team from the Eastern Conference…

They spend almost four minutes straight in their own zone until finally their second line left wing digs the puck out, dragging a gaggle of hockey players after him into the neutral zone and then getting called on an offside. Harry’s line takes the ice for the faceoff outside the Bruins’ end.

He manages to get it by a hair and toss it to Ed, and it’s immediately passed back to him so he can carry it over the blue line. In the next moment, he has all of half a second to register the feeling of a stick blade catching his skate before he pitches face-first onto the ice and keeps sliding to crash into the leg pads of the Bruins goalie. The whistle goes and, infuriatingly, it ends up as a 4-on-4: a Bruins D-man is boxed for tripping and Harry gets sent for goaltender interference even though this was in no way his fault. Apparently the refs are just going to be bastards for this game.

The next two minutes are made extra-annoying by the fact that his guys can’t keep the puck in the attacking zone for more than ten seconds before the Bruins are running away with it again, and thank god for Albert because he’s still Albert and doesn’t let anything get by him into the net.

13:56 left in the 1st as Harry comes flying out of the box - he catches a saucer pass and then wings the puck up the ice to Dale, who makes a shot from the blue line. It amounts to nothing; the puck goes up and out of play, which means Harry is immediately off the ice again with his wingers so the fourth line can come up.

“Harry-”

“Don’t say it, Cooper,” he snaps. “Don’t you fucking say it, we’ll lose this game if you do and you know it.”

Dale’s mouth closes and he looks away, but it’s written all over his expression: _I have a bad feeling about this._

Harry doesn’t know what the hell his team has done to piss off the hockey gods tonight, but the Bruins score twice in three minutes around the middle of the period. Right after that, Dale gets nauseous and is banished to the quiet room pending reevaluation at the start of the 2nd, leaving Harry without a right wing.

And then a D-man lands on him.

None of it is intentional, which is something he’ll only realize later on. This damn Bruin who’s built like a truck blows a tire and then crashes into Harry, sending them both down to the ice and by bad coincidence stabbing an elbow into the part of his ribs which are already broken. Harry can’t feel it, the anesthetic makes sure of that, but it crushes the air out of his lungs and when he breathes in that air doesn’t come back. He’s not in pain, he can’t feel it, but he still somehow immediately knows that something is _very_ wrong. He can’t suck in air, it won’t go into his chest, and that makes him panic. The Bruin who crunched him is talking, looking genuinely concerned - that really only makes this worse.

It finally comes to Harry that he’s frantically gasping, not able to recover his breath, and flailing one of his arms because he can’t actually say the words _help me_ right now. He waves a hand, slapping it against the ice, he needs one of the medical trainers. Oh, god. Oh, god, he can’t breathe, and it’s not like the other times he couldn’t breathe, because those were him being in too much pain to draw breath. This time, his lungs have simply stopped working, and he’s starting to feel dizzy. That just scares him more.

There are arms and hands on him, he’s dragged onto the stretcher and strapped down. They roll him off the ice and Will takes one look at him: “Hospital. _Now._ ”

Which is horrible all by itself, because in the back of the ambulance the EMT crams a tube into his mouth and down his throat, then puts one of those squeeze-balloon things on the part that’s still sticking out. The air comes at last, he’s breathing again, even if it’s not under his own power. Harry closes his eyes and relaxes except for trying not to keep gagging on this fucking plastic tube.

Some unfamiliar Boston hospital - they have to admit him right away since he’s not breathing on his own. His jersey is cut up so they can get it off him, but thank god they just undo the straps on his chest pad instead of cutting that too. His spandex shirt also dies a quick death to the nurses’ scissors and while the doctor is poking him in the chest and then sticking him with an IV, his skates and all the armor on his lower body are stripped off, leaving him with his compression shorts and jockstrap. Harry doesn’t try to put up a fight against any of it. He knows he’s in trouble because none of them are trying to talk at him. He’s so glad for the anesthetic, he’s so glad he can’t feel this. It seems like something that would really, _really_ hurt if he could.

And then there’s this: “He’s got flail-chest, let’s get a chest x-ray and then call the surgical team.”

They take the tube out of his throat and put him on oxygen instead. The doctor asks him a couple questions, but with it being so hard to breathe it’s also pretty much too hard for him to talk, too, so he gives her the number to contact Gordon with before they wheel him away to diagnostic imaging. Harry lies still and sucks on an oxygen tank while they radiate him, and about an hour and a half later something is shot into his IV that makes him loopy before getting taken into an OR. He’s staring at the big lights and then wakes up in recovery, now with that plastic tube with the prongs in his nose instead of a mask and a nurse looking down at him.

“Is Dale here?” Harry really wants to see Dale. His boyfriend is probably really worried.

“No, we don’t allow visitors in recovery.”

Harry’s given a fentanyl along with an oxy-something, and then they put him in a room where he immediately passes out again. It’s not an easy sleep because the nurses keep waking him up for things, and finally the next morning he gets to see Dale again.

“How are you feeling?”

“Like my ribs got crushed and they had to put in a bunch of metal strips to hold all the pieces in place,” Harry says dryly. “Did we win?”

Dale looks down at the floor. “No.”

“Dammit.”

“Harry, it’s absolutely absurd to me that you’re more concerned with the outcome of last night’s game than the fact that the entire team was firmly convinced that you were fatally injured.”

“They were?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. Well, I wasn’t,” Harry promises. “My broken ribs got broken in a few extra spots so there was a section of my chest that was just kinda floating there, but I didn’t puncture a lung or rupture any blood vessels. They should fully heal in six weeks if I stop playing hockey immediately.”

“Which you’re not going to do,” Dale guesses.

“Wasn’t planning on it, no.”

“Harry-”

“Don’t you _dare,_ ” he snaps, jabbing a finger at Dale’s chest. “You fractured your sternum and you _still_ have a concussion. You have no room to talk.”

“Yes, I suppose that’s true.” Dale pauses. “Gordon would like you to know that at the very least you’re scratched tomorrow night, and he won’t be hearing any arguments. He said we’ll see about game three but not to hold your breath.”

Harry has to wonder if that choice of words was deliberate.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would like, so much, to be exaggerating the brutality of the injuries that hockey players continue to skate with during the Stanley Cup championship. Believe you me, I'm _not._ (I would also like to say that I haven't just been randomly adding injuries for sensationalism or shock value, all of these were intended from the second that I realized this fic was turning out to be as long as it is.)
> 
> A note on the retired numbers and the identity of the Bruins' head coach: those are actually easter eggs that I put in for a friend of mine who's also a Bruins fan. For the uninitiated, 33 is Zdeno Chara (current captain as of 14 August 2020) and 37 is Patrice Bergeron (alt-captain and one of the best players in the league at the time of this writing, seriously his talent is insane. You know how magical Cooper is in this fic? Imagine that, but he can actually play defense and doesn't get in nearly as many fights. That's Patrice Bergeron).


	46. Stanley Cup Final Vs. Bruins, Game 4

Being on home ice again is so gratifying - granted, he only played part of one game in Boston, but still. He wants to be in Seattle wearing a green jersey instead of a white one while fans cheer for his team and not these assholes.

Under his chest pad, he’s wound with gauze wraps and then a support bandage as well, which is annoying but he guesses he’ll just have to get used to it. Dale has the same problem; his incision site is healing slowly and very sensitive, probably because he’s been exerting all his energy playing sports instead of resting like he should be. (Like they both should be - Harry couldn’t be less innocent on this issue if he tried.)

The two games that he missed, miraculously, were wins. So if they can get two more games, the Cup is theirs. Harry tugs his helmet on with a little bit of annoyance because his hair is starting to grow out again, then gets up and leads the guys out onto the ice for warm-ups. The fans all cheer when they see him - Twitter was abuzz while he was scratched, worrying collectively that he might be down for the count and not coming back for the rest of the Final. But who cares that medically speaking he should probably still be in the hospital, he’s not abandoning his team to the wrath of the Bruins.

They all scurry around to get themselves in gear, taking pot-shots at Albert to warm him up as well. Occasionally they flip pucks up over the glass to be caught by children gathered on the other side. Harry stops to pull aside a player here or there, quietly giving directions: if you’re on the ice with this-and-such a Bruin, you go after him and dog him and kick his ass. Harry doesn’t hand out these instructions to all his players, just the ones he thinks can cause the most damage to the opposition.

They go back down the tunnel and sit in their stalls.

“Alright, fellas,” Gordon starts. “I think we know by now that we can expect a lot of fights from these guys. So here’s the deal, if one of your injured teammates is about to get into it with an opponent and you’re healthy, I want you to step in and take that fight instead if you can’t de-escalate it. Coop, Harry, I as always refer to you when I say this, because I’m tired of the two of you needing to be dragged off the ice by an ambulance crew. We can also safely expect their power play to be exactly as useless as ours is, so we need to take advantage of that. On the other hand, this is not a team known for getting shorthanded goals, so we’ve got that going for us. Now, after the mishap the other night we know for sure that that D-man got scratched because his injuries are too severe, so the Bruins are up to a total of eight callups from their AHL farm-team. As of right now, our roster has all of its original players filling the slots, which is advantageous for chemistry but puts them up by having a fresh uninjured body. They are also still captainless, but they seem to have completely adapted to that by now, so we can no longer count it as a weak point in their leadership and strategy. Harry?”

He gets up and moves to the center.

“Guys, look. I know you’re all real tired by now. Mental fatigue, getting hurt, just - the fact we’re facing this team in particular. It’s wearing on you. Let’s keep in mind that they’re in the same boat. They’re missing almost half their roster, and we’ve gotten two games in a row. Let’s see if we can’t get them even more demoralized. We’re so close, we only need two more wins.”

They pile onto the ice. Harry’s line starts, facing up to the Bruins’ checking line. The linesman drops the puck and he can’t get it, but Bobby manages to steal it almost immediately and the game kicks off with all ten skaters battling for control in the neutral zone. Nobody can hang onto the damn thing for more than three seconds between passes and turnover-by-theft, and it’s frustrating. When the puck finally crosses a blue line, it’s on a Bruin stick into the Kraken’s zone, which ends with Albert making a blocker save that sends it up out of play. Harry’s line goes to the bench and Gordon sends their own checking line against the Bruins’ second.

The beginning of the game unfolding in front of him has his undivided attention until he notices that Dale is not only rubbing at his chest pad because the bandages are probably causing him a sensory issue but has also lifted his bubble so he can scratch the side of his face. Harry drops his stick and his gloves so he can grab both of his boyfriend’s wrists and put a stop to the fidgeting.

Out on the ice, the lines are changing on both sides in the neutral zone, which ends with Bobby and Mike chasing down that shrimpy kid and ultimately a hooking call on Bobby. The Bruins’ first line stays on for their usually-toothless power play; Harry and Dale are sent with the first D-pair to counter it.

Harry wins the faceoff and it goes to Dale like usual. The short kid manages to immediately steal the puck, and in response Dale checks him off it so hard he sprawls backwards into the boards. The shrimpy Bruin immediately comes over to jab Dale, who hits back, and as the gloves are being thrown Harry bolts over to them because Dale should absolutely not be fighting.

“Hey, HEY!” he yells, getting in the middle of the two with his arms up to separate them.

That doesn’t stop the tiny guy’s wrath, though, just redirects it. Harry’s hand is smacked roughly away and then there’s a fist wrapped in his jersey. That makes him really, _really_ angry. How dare this little shit go after his boyfriend like that. Harry barely realizes that he’s now also flinging away his gloves and stick, and after that it’s just… a mess. There’s a nine-inch height difference between them, which means neither of them is that effective at punching each other because the kid can’t reach and Harry’s off-center trying to lean down some. Knuckles ream into the hurt part of his chest and even with the anesthetic there is still a dim flare of discomfort, so that spurs him on to rail his own fist into the shrimp’s face until he feels something crunch.

The refs and the linesmen pry them away from each other finally. Harry’s knuckles are bleeding from hitting a helmet instead of a face more often than not in his frenzy; the short Bruin spits out his mouthguard in a drool that turns red from his gushing nose and throws a bunch of swear words at Harry in Quebecois. Both of them are put in their separate sin-bins for fighting majors, and Dale joins Harry for the first two minutes on a boarding call for throwing the shrimp too hard with that body-check. It’s now 4-on-3 on the ice with the Bruins technically still at the man advantage.

“Cap, I think you busted his nose,” Bobby grins, also packed in there with them.

“Good,” Harry snaps, rubbing his achy hand. “Little bastard deserves everything he got.”

“Are you alright, Harry?” Dale asks.

“Yeah, I think so. I’ll be fine.”

Bobby gets out first of course, with Dale following about ten seconds after. Harry is still stuck there for another three minutes before he’s free again. He’s back on the ice with part of the checking line and the third D-pair for roughly seven seconds when Albert gets scored on - the Bruins have drawn first blood. Harry just stands and waits for what he knows is coming, and it doesn’t take long for Hawk and Dale to join him at center ice with Andy and Ed following close behind for the faceoff.

Harry smacks the puck backwards to where Ed is waiting and they all scatter, passing almost randomly and making the Bruins give chase. It comes back to Harry, he whips it to Dale, and Dale charges over the blue line and around the back of the net. As soon as Harry’s fully in the attacking zone it’s passed to him again and he takes the shot - it rings off the crossbar, hits the goalie in the back, and bounces in. The horn goes and his teammates kind-of-gently crash into him, slapping his helmet and arms. An answering goal in twelve seconds… not bad, if he says so himself.

“Good work, Harry,” Dale smiles as they sit together on the bench.

“Couldn’a done it without you, Coop.” Harry grins back and slaps his boyfriend’s shoulder pad.

“Save it ’til you get home, guys,” Hawk teases on Harry’s right.

Approaching the ten-minute mark in the 1st, a Bruin gets into it with Mike and gets a fighting major with an instigator attached, which means the Kraken will be on the power play for five minutes. The only saving grace they have is that the Bruins are not known for commonly getting shorties; Harry’s still not confident the first power play unit can even protect Albert, though, forget about actually scoring. He watches as they struggle to pull together against the Bruins’ penalty kill team, and unsurprisingly an opponent does get a breakaway eventually. What _is_ surprising is that it’s the little short kid, now wearing a bubble to protect his black-and-blue face. A shot from the right circle, the two Kraken D-men are at least fifteen feet back and can’t do anything about this, and Albert just barely misses catching it in his glove.

What follows is a totally absurd celebration of this goal: the shrimp jumps onto one of his taller teammates, riding to their team’s bench piggy-back with one arm up holding his stick in the air. It’d be really funny, honestly, if Harry wasn’t so pissed. For once he feels like he’s in solidarity with Albert, because seeing that little bastard score on a dumb luck shot is bad enough without the ridiculous-ass display that came after.

No more goals are scored during the period on either side and the Kraken head back down the tunnel frustrated and angry. Ed is pulled aside for the interview with Lucy and Harry leaves some of his gear in his stall before going to get his ribs (and his sore fist to a lesser extent) checked by the medics. They deem him fit for duty, though just barely, and wrap his surgery site in fresh gauze pads and bandages to replace the sweat-soaked ones that came off during the inspection.

“Why aren’t you working as a team, fellas?” Gordon demands from the middle of the floor. “Mike, Bobby, you’re not supporting each other! Harry, Cooper, no more fighting! Defensemen in general, stop fucking leaving Albert out to dry like that! This is an unacceptable performance versus a team that’s almost fifty percent AHL players! We need to win two more games, and you’re sure as hell not going to pull it off playing like this! With the exception of about three of you, everyone needs to shape up for the next two periods!”

They pile back out onto the ice for the 2nd. The checking line and second D-pair are sent to start, which means Harry sitting on the bench between Hawk and Dale talking strategy with them. One of the many weird and unique problems with facing off against the Bruins is that while they hit like a logging truck offensively and like to fight, they’re not exactly a dirty team, so the penalties called on them are usually really random and can’t be planned for. The refs hate the Bruins almost as much as Harry does, leading to a lot of (admittedly bullshit) calls, and the reasoning behind those is all over the place usually.

He thinks back, _way_ back, to his season with the Habs. God, that was so long ago. Throwing hands had always been considered a perfectly viable tactic, but of course that was during the regular season without an insanely high injury count. But the Kraken are down by one… Harry has to come up with something, fast.

An offside is called and the first line is sent by Gordon. Harry leads his wingers to the faceoff dot outside the attacking zone and his brain switches off, hockey is all instinct and no thought for him. The puck is dropped and there’s a slight scuffle before Harry gets it, carrying it backwards himself a few feet before tossing it to Hawk, who barrels over the blue line and passes to Dale half a second before a Bruin crashes into him. The pass gets intercepted and good thing Andy is there to get in the way and keep a breakaway from happening; he doesn’t manage to steal the puck back, but he does slow down the enemy D-man long enough for Dale to swipe it away in the neutral zone.

The whistle goes and Harry’s not sure why until he looks over his shoulder and sees _Hawk_ of all people throwing down with an opposing winger. That’s just so weird, he can’t remember the last time he saw Hawk fight, but he knows it was at least a couple years ago. It doesn’t last that long but when it ends they know, even more shockingly, that Hawk’s the one who started it because now the Kraken are on the penalty kill.

The game continues to not go their way. Albert stops the Bruins from putting up any more goals, but the Kraken can’t get out of their own zone for more than fifteen seconds and Harry can tell his guys are getting frustrated because their plays are becoming more jagged, less cohesive, sloppy. The Bruins are obviously taking advantage of this and he doesn’t know if he can fix it.

Gordon is livid during the second intermission, throwing accusations at pretty much everybody but Albert, and all of them are justified. The Kraken have been floundering and it’s inexcusable, they’re losing 2-1 still. Harry can already tell that they won’t be able to pull together and salvage this game in the 3rd and mentally writes it off as a loss. All around him, at least half his guys are undoubtedly doing the same thing.

The worst part is being right. Twenty minutes of play and a 3-1 score later, he’s stuffing all his shit into his gear bag so that he can go home and pack for their fucking flight back to fucking Boston tomorrow, which he’ll have to rush to get done before the anesthetic in his ribs wears off and leaves him more or less bedridden with pain for the rest of the night.

God, he hates the Bruins.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So… yeah, meta in this chapter. After everything I've done to Harry and his boyfriend, I figured he deserved to get a chance to beat me up. That's literally it. That's the entire reason I gave myself a cameo in this fic. He should get to have at least a tiny level of revenge satisfied against me for all I've put him through.


	47. Stanley Cup Final Vs. Bruins, Game 5 (Aftermath)

“Unbelievable,” Harry grumbles, pacing in the hotel room.

“Harry-”

“UN _FUCKING_ BELIEVABLE!” he bellows, mostly because he no longer has to be strong and composed for the team. He can be frustrated and outraged and demoralized so long as Dale’s the only one around to see. “The only time I’ve made it to a Final and I’m gonna lose the Cup to the fucking _Bruins!_ ”

“Do you really have so little faith in your teammates to automatically assume we’ll choke two nights from now?” Dale asks quietly.

Harry unclenches his fists, unclenches his jaw, breathes out heavily.

“No. I know we _can_ do it.”

“Exactly.”

“I just don’t know that we _will._ Coop… I can’t be one’a those captains who someday retires without winning a Stanley Cup at least once. Okay, I’m not a great player, my number’s gonna be back in circulation, I have no chance to make it into the Hall of Fame or anything. In six or seven years I’m gonna hang up the blades and everyone everywhere will just forget about me, and I’ll be a has-been. I won’t leave a single mark on the world when I go.”

Dale opens his mouth to answer but there’s a knock on the door. Harry opens it to find Mike for some damn reason.

“Cap, you _gotta_ see this.”

The three of them go to the dining area of the hotel, which is still open despite it being past 10:30. Most of the team is gathered around Bobby’s phone, but they make space for Harry and then Bobby presses play to some video clip on Twitter that’s less than a minute long… it turns out to be the Bruins’ on-ice reporter and the shrimpy kid, in an away jersey so apparently following game four. He also has tape over his nose and two splits in his lower lip, to say nothing of the bruises blooming across his left cheek and jaw.

_“Well, you certainly earned your paycheck tonight.”_

_“Yeah. I got beat up by Harry Truman, it’s an honor.”_

_“Why do you say that?”_

_“When I was… like fourteen, he was a Hab for a season. Obviously, that’s the team I watched growing up, so I watched him and he was so good. Then he got traded and I was upset aboot it so I would still kinda keep an eye out for what he was doing. He left an impression on me as a hockey player, I mean, I still look up to him a little bit. So it’s kinda funny, getting beat up by one of your heroes on the ice.”_

Harry can’t believe it - who the hell does that little bastard think he is to say this shit?

“You inspired a Bruin, cap,” Bobby laughs. “Maybe you should retire right now in shame, man. God damn.”

Harry just groans and storms off back to his hotel room, aware of Dale following close behind.

“Do you want some ice, Harry?”

“No, the Tylenol kicked in, it’s not that bad…” Harry sits on the corner of the bed and rubs his face on his palms, used to the feeling of his scruffy playoff beard by now. His train of thought comes back from when Mike interrupted them. “I’m running outta time, Dale. It just… it came to me tonight, in the locker room. I never even thought about this before but I’m thirty four years old now and I don’t feel like I accomplished a damn thing.”

“Harry, there’s no age cutoff for retirement. Zdeno Chara and Jaromir Jagr played in the NHL long into their forties, I have no reason to believe you wouldn’t also be capable of such a thing. And I don’t agree that you’ve accomplished nothing. You’ve managed to foster an extremely positive locker room culture for the team and have normalized the concept, at least for the Kraken, that players who are… abnormal… are perfectly acceptable and make positive contributions. You’re so loved by the team, Harry. Even Albert. And if for nothing else, you _will_ very likely be put into the Hall of Fame or somehow formally recognized in hockey history because so far you’re the only team captain who’s come out publicly.”

“Yeah, _that’s_ what I want to be remembered for,” Harry grumbles sarcastically. “Coop, this team is gonna hang onto you until the day you retire, and someday your number is getting hung up in our rafters. I know mine won’t be up there with it, and I’ve made peace with that a long time ago. But I wanna know that I made some kinda difference by the time I stop being a hockey player. And I really want to get at least one Cup before the end.”

Apparently Dale realizes that there’s not much he can say to help, so he doesn’t answer and just sits on the bed too, slipping his hand inside Harry’s.


	48. Stanley Cup Final Vs. Bruins, Game 6

A 3-3 score and sudden death overtime - it’s do or die for the Kraken. The Bruins have three wins and they only have two, if they lose tonight it’s all over. They _have_ to pull this off.

What makes things extra-scary for Harry is that he knows the anesthetic in his ribs will wear off soon and he’ll be in too much pain to keep playing, and it’ll be the same for Dale (although Dale probably _will_ keep playing almost like he’s trying to spite his own injury).

First line and second D-pair are sent to start overtime, theoretically the most aggressive Kraken players. Harry’s getting worn out, though, and he knows Hawk is, too. Hopefully the Bruins are also exhausted, things are on reasonably even footing…

Harry loses the faceoff. Everything feels like it’s in slow motion, but he realizes that it’s not, they’re all just dragging, too tired to play by now. An entire fourth period of hockey. It’s unreasonable. There’s too many injuries.

He blows a tire on a turn and crashes down to the ice, no stoppage of play. As he gets up again the whistle goes for an offside against the Bruins and the Kraken’s checking line changes on. Short shifts for everyone. They’re too tired for this. But they’re also desperate… they can’t lose, not now, not in overtime on game six… they should at least get all the way to game seven…

It’s the same for both teams. No player is on the ice for more than fifteen seconds except for sometimes the D-men, who stay on for twenty or so because there’s less of them to take up the slack. By the time the clock is down to 15:00 there’s already been at least twenty shifts on each side. Andy keeps falling down. Mike is too slow. Even Dale misses passes, now. The fatigue is showing horribly and it’s hideous, sloppy play. But the Bruins are obviously frustrated, too, because they’re having the same problems. It’s a weird brand of equality.

13:02 left - Bobby gets a fighting major and a 4-on-4 is determined by the refs. Harry and Dale go with the third D-pair. The ice feels less crowded, there’s only eight skaters and the goalies don’t count. Harry self-passes off the sideboards and gets to the blue line, but the Bruins goalie stops the puck in his glove.

10:37 left - the Bruins ice the puck and take a faceoff in their own zone. They manage to break out only to be called on an offside at the Kraken’s blue line. The entire checking line and Mike as the lone D-man take the faceoff and for awhile they’re stuck in the neutral zone scrumming with Bruins players, and it’s just a mess. Then a linesman gets hit in the neck with the puck by accident and play stops for a little bit.

08:04 left - Harry’s starting to feel the first twinges of discomfort in his chest. He has to ignore them, convince himself they’re not real. He wins the faceoff, just barely, and the puck goes to Hawk, who gets checked and there’s a turnover. Bobby is finally out of the box, but so is the fifth Bruin. Harry shoves an opponent off the puck and steals it for himself, but his pass to Mike is intercepted and they’re now running back to his team’s zone where Albert traps it down and play stops again.

04:53 left - it’s so awful. Harry can barely move anymore, the pain in his broken ribs has gone up from a “two” to a “six” on the pain scale and he knows in about three minutes it’ll be back up to a “ten.” He wants to throw up, but he doesn’t. And then he gets cross-checked right in the mouth. He doesn’t lose any teeth, but his gums bleed a little bit from the impact and he loses his mouthguard after spitting it out onto the ice. The Bruin who does it goes for a penalty and Harry gets even more nervous, their power play still sucks…

04:19 left - Harry’s line is up again, 5-on-4. His chest pain is up to a “seven.” Still he manages to slap the puck over to Dale and shoves his way past the Bruins’ D-men somehow, the puck comes to Andy comes to Hawk comes to Ed comes to Dale comes to Harry and Harry takes a shot, completely off-balance, and ends up throwing himself down to the ice on thankfully his right side and not his left.

And then the most beautiful noise comes to his ears: the goal horn.

It’s fucking _over_ finally, they’re 4-3 and going to game seven. Harry rolls onto his back and lies there for a second, resting, grinning even though he’s in agony. They’re not down for the count yet. They just have to get one more win in Boston, two nights from now. God his ribs hurt but he doesn’t care. They won.

Dale wobbles from side to side walking back to the locker room and throws up when he’s in the shower a couple minutes later because his concussion still hasn’t gone away. Harry is half-dressed in his pads and also throws up, but in a trash can because he can’t move very far to get someplace else… it’s from pain and fatigue and too much Gatorade. God, it hurts… he needs a ridiculous amount of Tylenol and some ice… Harry rinses out his mouth with water and also spits that out into the trash, and then two minutes later is throwing up a second time even though there’s no way in hell anything should still be in his stomach.

A difficult victory. But a victory nonetheless.

Game seven is in Boston, two nights from now.

One way or the other, it’s going to end.


	49. Stanley Cup Final Vs. Bruins, Game 7

They go to the first intermission with a 2-1 score in their favor.

“Looking good so far, guys,” Harry says from the middle of the locker room. “We’re _so close_ now, pretty soon we’re gonna be drinking champagne outta that thing. Forty more minutes. We can handle that, right?”

A chorus of “yes”s and “yeah”s sounds around him.

“We’re almost done. We’re playing well. We’ve got this. It’s too bad we can’t win on home ice, but that doesn’t matter because we’re gonna win anyway.”

His bandages get changed and then he leads his guys onto the ice for the 2nd. His chest is numbed, his skates cut in, he’s on the tip of an impending adrenalin spike. His fingers curl inside his armored gloves to secure the handle of his stick. He’s _ready._

Harry moves too soon by accident and gets thrown off the faceoff dot, so Dale switches and takes it for him. The puck immediately finds Harry and he skates backwards with it a little, trying to get good positioning. He passes to Hawk, who passes it back immediately, so he moves sideways, closer to Dale, drawing two Bruins forwards after him. This is a trick - Harry whacks the puck over to Bobby, who sends it to Dale and Dale takes off with it only to get boarded immediately by an opposing D-man. Harry waits for a whistle but it doesn’t come, the refs are in “last day of school” mode and won’t make calls unless they absolutely have to. Never mind that Dale is on his knees, holding his chest. So Harry forces a call by throwing hands and getting himself a fighting major.

He wasn’t counting on the instigator penalty, though… so now he’ll miss almost the entire 2nd period because the refs didn’t care enough to punish a Bruin for hurting an already-injured player. So Harry is left to sit in the box for fifteen minutes and watch. Dale rests on the bench for awhile, sipping red Gatorade, and Gordon doesn’t send him for some amount of time. The Bruins get a second goal for themselves but then the Kraken’s checking line happens and it’s 3-2 in their favor, they’re ahead again.

Nearing the end of Harry’s instigator penalty, Ed joins him in the sin-bin for a goaltender interference infraction which puts the Bruins on the power play… and together they watch with growing frustration as the score gets evened up again.

Harry comes back on the ice with 4:27 left in the 2nd. His guys are pouring on the effort, giving it their all, trying to get the score back in their favor before the period ends. He spanks the puck hard off the boards to indirectly pass to a teammate, they have a scoring chance, but the Bruins goalie leg-saves and then they’re chasing the fucking thing all the way back to their own end.

Just over three minutes to go before the second intermission, Andy steps on the puck and goes down - he limps into the tunnel and Harry can already tell the game is over for him. God damn injuries, now they’re short a D-man. Harry’s line takes the ice alongside Mike and Bobby, changing on man-by-man and trying to force a better positioning for themselves. The Bruin with the puck does get shoved over the blue line, which drags his teammates with him because they don’t want to get called on an offside, and Harry tries to intercept a pass but can’t quite get there in time so play is immediately back in his team’s zone again where he doesn’t want it to be.

Albert - still, from the beginning, a god in goalie pads. He makes eight saves in ten seconds without a stoppage of play, the Bruins are bombarding him but the score stays right where it is at 3-3. Finally Albert manages to poke the puck away from the cluster and over to Dale, and the Kraken are able to leave their own end at last.

It’s not a breakaway because the D-men are hounding Dale, they’re close by and trying to control him. A badly-timed pass to Harry rules an offside and the fourth line gets onto the ice to take the faceoff in the neutral zone with about two and a half minutes to go. Nothing really comes of it, no progress is made on either side, and the second intermission sees a tied score as both teams head for the locker rooms.

Dale, who’s shaking and clearly in unbearable pain, takes the center floor.

“How did we lose our momentum, fellas?” he asks, not accusing or disappointed, but genuinely asking. “I don’t believe any of us are interested in this game running to overtime. Our defense has taken a blow, so we’ll have to be mindful of that for the 3rd and try not to overextend them as much. The referees are completely lacking in motivation to oversee this match, they’re exhausted like we are and we can’t count on them to make fair calls, so avoid taking hits as much as you can. Out-fighting the Bruins is not a sound strategy for us, focus on skill work instead.”

The 3rd. Harry’s starting to get twinges of apprehension, he doesn’t like going into a period with a tied score because the results are way too unpredictable. Things could very literally go either way and he hates that, not knowing what to expect, how to react. And his boyfriend is in pain from getting crunched earlier, despite the anesthetic. Maybe they didn’t give Dale enough of it…

The fourth line starts, just to catch the Bruins off-balance because they’re probably expecting the Kraken’s first or checking lines to kick off the period. Harry watches from the bench and tries to bury his worries. This is the absolute worst time for him to be thinking about anything at all, he can’t have any room for doubts.

Harry slaps Dale’s hand away from his face five times before their line goes on. Dale shouldn’t be going on though, he’s hurt. If he gets checked in the chest, his sternum could splinter and he could die. If he takes a hit to the head, his brain could start bleeding again and he could die. He shouldn’t be on the ice.

Harry loses the faceoff and is also immediately knocked on his ass as a Bruin charges past him. No whistle. Lazy fucking refs, they just want their summer off to start as soon as possible and don’t care about a fair game. Harry gets back up almost the second he lands and joins the scrum against the sideboards, jabbing with his stick blade to try and dig the puck loose.

All the flailing around - it’s an accident waiting to happen. And it _does_ happen. Dale gets elbowed in the sternum and goes down. The refs actually wait fifteen seconds to see if he’ll stand back up on his own, even though he’s rolling onto his side with his arms over his chest.

Harry takes off one of his gloves and throws it at the linesman. “Are you gonna fucking stop play so he can get help, you asshole?”

Finally the whistle blows. Harry kneels by Dale, who’s breathing unevenly - but there’s tears running down his face, too, so it could just be because he’s in too much pain, the injury might not actually be any worse, maybe he’s just shaken… Harry pulls him up, gently. First to sitting, then to his knees, then up all the way. An arm across his back for support and Harry slowly skates him to the tunnel.

They’re in the safety of the tunnel now, where there’s no cameras. Dale lets out one sob, like a bark, and then a second one.

“Coop, talk to me, what is it?” Harry asks.

“It hurts,” Dale moans. He sobs a third time. “It hurts!”

“Okay, that’s okay, the medics are gonna look at you and probably give you some ice and some painkillers, you’re gonna be okay,” he promises.

It’s horribly obvious now that Dale’s on sensory overload. The stress of the playoffs has fried him mentally and now he can’t cope with the pain; in the regular season, without all this pressure, Dale would probably be able to just turn this off and not show any signs of being hurt until after the game.

“Head or chest?” the medical trainer asks, reaching for Dale.

“DON’T TOUCH ME!” he bellows, smacking the hand away.

“Chest,” Harry answers, carefully undoing the straps on his boyfriend’s helmet and tugging it free. “Coop, take off your jersey.”

It used to be that Dale wouldn’t let anyone touch him when he’s on overload… he doesn’t mind Harry anymore, though, which is a really good thing because they need to make sure he’s okay.

One of the on-ice staff comes in and looks right at Harry. “Cap, the refs want you to know that you’re going for a delay-of-game penalty as soon as you’re back.”

“I don’t care,” Harry snaps. He turns back to the task at hand and helps pull Dale’s arms out of the jersey sleeves. “Okay. Dale, hey, try to breathe slower. Don’t take deep breaths, just normal breaths, and make sure you breathe slow. I’ll get this off you.”

The chest pad goes and the medical trainer slowly steps closer. “Coop, can I look you over, please?”

Dale sniffs in, hard. He wipes his face on the sleeve of his compression shirt. “Yes. I’m sorry.”

Harry leans down and kisses his forehead. “I have to go sit in the box.”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

Harry goes back up the tunnel and heads for the sin-bin right away; his stick and the glove he threw are in there waiting for him with a bottle of Gatorade. Meanwhile the score is still 3-3 and his boyfriend is sitting on an exam table, crying and having a meltdown. Harry suddenly realizes that he really fucking hates this. As much as he loves hockey, he can’t excuse the brutality that’s going on anymore. It’s so beyond unreasonable at this point what all of them have had to put up with just to get this far.

And this dumbass delay-of-game penalty… because a teammate was hurt and Harry was trying to help. Unbelievable.

The box is opened for him and he jumps out onto the ice. He’s with part of the second line right now, and also Mike and Bobby. The Bruins have sent their fourth line, young goons from the AHL, so now the Kraken are getting bulldozed back into their own zone. Bobby very obviously and deliberately trips a Bruin to force a turnover and it’s still not called… Harry is sick of this reffing, even when its unfairness is in his favor. Play stops when the tripped Bruin throws hands with Bobby and now they’re at 4-on-4 for five minutes. Fan-fucking-tastic.

At 11:13 left in the game, Dale comes back to sit on the bench, which is ridiculous. He’s done so much already and he’s hurt.

“Coop, you could’a sat out…” Harry starts to say, then realizes how pointless it is to finish that sentence.

“I’ll be alright,” Dale promises, looking like he doesn’t actually believe what he’s saying.

His heart jumps into his throat when the Bruins get one in on Albert, but then Gordon challenges and it’s retroactively called offside and the score stays at 3-3. The Bruins’ head coach looks pissed and Harry’s blood pressure goes back to normal.

When there’s three minutes left, the Bruins hit the back of the net for real.

The score is 4-3 in the Bruins’ favor. That can’t be allowed to stand. They have to get back even, go to overtime. Harry refuses to lose the Stanley Cup to the fucking Bruins after everything the team has suffered through.

His guys, to their credit, push extra-hard for this. They fight the puck into the attacking zone and keep it there, but no goals are forthcoming. The first line is sent by Gordon and they change on man-by-man, and the ping-pong routine happens for a little bit. They can’t afford that. They don’t have time, there’s forty five seconds left for Christ’s sake… Hawk takes a shot, a kick-save. Dale takes one, blocker-save. Twenty two seconds. Harry skates almost fully backwards to the blue line before passing to Bobby, who smacks it only to ring off the fucking post. Harry gets it again. He’s got a shot lined up-

His stick shatters.

Harry drops it instinctively, Hawk tries to rescue the puck, they should still have just enough time.

Except that they don’t.

The horn goes overhead because the clock has run dry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, you read that right.


	50. After The End

Harry just stands there, staring up at the clock. The Bruins are all laughing and yelling and piling onto the ice, grabbing each other to celebrate. None of this actually touches his brain at first, he doesn’t believe it’s real…

“Harry.” He looks and there’s Dale, touching his arm. “Harry.”

“Oh.”

They lost.

Harry slowly returns to his end of the ice, where his teammates are also gathering. They all press their foreheads on Albert’s. They know it’s not his fault. Harry can feel gloves tapping all over his body, but it’s like those touches aren’t real and he just imagines them. What makes it snap into place, what brings him back to consciousness, is his boyfriend hugging him, bubble clacking slightly as it makes contact with his eye-visor. And the thought comes that they both have hurt chests and shouldn’t be hugging each other so hard. But what else can they do?

They lost the Stanley Cup tonight.

Most of the Kraken players are dejected and have tears running down their faces. Harry can’t possibly cry, though. He’s bitter and angry that it has to end this way. Why did they deserve this? Why did his fucking stick have to crack at just the wrong second? Why does the DoPS have to be so fucking useless? How can this just be it for his guys?

The teams line up to shake hands and Harry tucks his right glove under his arm. A couple Bruins slap his shoulder. Harry doesn’t want any of them touching him but he has no choice. And then he comes to the fucking short kid again, grinning behind the bubble that Harry put him in.

“I’m sorry aboot your ribs.”

Harry glowers. “I’m _not_ sorry about your face.”

The shrimpy Bruin laughs and then shrugs. “Well, that’s fair.”

Unbelievable. “Don’t talk about me in your interviews.”

“Okay, man, I won’t.”

Nobody says a word when they’re all sitting in the locker room. Some guys don’t even get undressed; maybe they just forgot. A lot of them are still crying. Harry can’t look any of them in the eye. He hates that they still trust him after this. He couldn’t get them the Stanley Cup. So he just keeps his face covered by his hands. Harry doesn’t want to be seen.

There are exactly two players in the room who have been through this before: Dale and Albert. Both of them went to the Final twice when they were still with the Flyers, and neither time resulted in them going home with the Cup. So, they’re the two calmest men here. They’re unhappy, but they’re coping. No other Kraken player can say such a thing. None of them can cope with this.

After about twenty five minutes, there’s talking… murmuring, anyway. Quietly trying to comfort each other. Harry still can’t look. And he realizes he’s one of the guys who forgot to take off his pads. He doesn’t raise his head out of his palms. He doesn’t move at all except to breathe.

There’s slight shuffling at his side. Harry doesn’t turn to see what Hawk’s doing because it’s not important and it doesn’t change anything. But the hands pulling his wrists away aren’t Hawk’s… Dale is sitting in Hawk’s stall now, in spandex and skate-socks. Harry won’t (can’t) move on his own so Dale moves him, pulling off his jersey and his chest pad in a sick mirror opposite of what happened less than an hour ago. His elbow pads, too, and then Dale hugs him from the side even though both of them are in damp compression shirts. Harry lets this happen. There’s nothing else he can do.

Dale strokes the side of his face a couple times and then crouches down to untie his skates. Those come off, the leg-socks are rolled up so that the shin guards can be unstrapped. His pants are next, the Velcro tabs on his leg-socks are separated, and now he sits in just his spandex shorts and long-sleeved shirt. Dale even peels his skate-socks off his feet.

“Harry.”

He doesn’t say anything and stares down at the edge of the bench between his thighs.

“Harry, I know it’s not easy right now,” Dale whispers, so quietly that even in this echoey-ass locker room it doesn’t carry. “You should try to get cleaned up, it’ll help.”

Words are so cheap. He can see his own despair in his boyfriend’s expression. Somehow this almost feels like mourning a death… they were so close… just one goal and a stick that snapped…

The backs of Dale’s fingers run lightly down the side of Harry’s face. Harry’s ears open a little more, he can hear what the murmurs are saying all around him. Albert, of all people, is trying to be _comforting_ for once. Bobby is on the phone with Shelly. Andy still sits in his tall sniffling and carrying on. Hawk and Ed are going back and forth on everything they, personally, could’ve done different during the game to have gotten the team a win instead.

Dale gets up and sits next to him again, putting an arm across his shoulders and leaning into him. Harry still rests his forearms on his knees, hands folded together. He hangs his head.

The team just stays in their borrowed locker room for hours. At some point one of the guys orders pizzas, and most of them eat at least a little. Harry doesn’t - the anesthetic has long since worn off and he’s in pain, but he wouldn’t want food anyway even if he wasn’t. It’s way past midnight when they all finally leave and go back to the hotel. Harry strips the second the door closes and gets in the shower. He still hasn’t said a word since they… since it happened.

Coming out with a towel around his waist, he lets Dale redo his bandages and then puts on sweatpants. He goes back into the bathroom to shave finally… there’s no relief from it, though. He kept imagining how good it would feel to get rid of this overgrown scruff from his jaw but nothing feels good right now.

Once that’s done with, he lies down with ice packs stuffed between his arm and his flailed ribs. He listens to Dale also showering and shaving as well, wondering what he did to anger the hockey gods so that his fucking stick would fucking shatter at the wrong fucking moment like it did. Dale comes out again, face smooth and hair combed, and Harry gets up again to do his bandages for him, too.

Neither of them sleeps. For one thing, they’re covered in ice. It makes cuddling impossible. So they lie on their backs, chests piled with cold packs and holding hands.

Sometime around 3:30, Dale takes a deep breath.

“I knew we weren’t going to win.”

Harry raises his head a little. “What?”

“I knew we weren’t going to win.”

“How did you know, Coop?”

“I don’t know. I had a bad feeling. But I didn’t say anything because it always made you get so upset with me.”

“It’s not your fault, Dale.”

“It’s not yours either, Harry.”

During breakfast the next morning, Harry’s not sure any of his teammates slept either, looking at the bags under their eyes. Every single one of them has shaved. Nobody talks while they eat and the seven hour flight home to Seattle takes too long. Thank god, none of them try to say anything to him. He doesn’t know how to answer any words right now.

When they arrive Harry dumps their luggage into the back of his truck and then puts the keys in Dale’s hand. He can’t drive now. He’s barely holding himself together anymore and it’s only because some of the guys are still around and can see him. Then they leave the parking garage, nobody’s looking at him. And finally whatever it is that’s been keeping him from shattering into a million pieces lets go, and he bursts into tears, heaving and gasping sobs the entire drive home. They sit in the driveway for a few minutes while Dale pats his back and his shoulder, until finally he’s present enough to move and get out of the truck.

They go inside and Harry lies on the couch for awhile, wearing a mound of ice packs on his chest. He settles into the numbness that always comes after the end.


	51. Hockey Gods

“You have to wear sunscreen,” Doris scolds.

“I want Uncle Dale to do it!” Joey insists.

Harry snorts. “Looks like you’re up, Uncle Dale,” he teases.

Joey started calling Harry’s boyfriend that pretty much the second they got here last week. Thankfully, Dale doesn’t seem to mind. He doesn’t mind this, either, and smears the sunscreen all over Joey’s back. The three of them pick up their towels and go to the beach.

“I don’t like it,” Dale says for the fourteenth time.

Harry rolls his eyes. “Well, it’ll grow back, in a couple months I’ll be long and shaggy again just for you, Coop.”

It was Hawk’s idea. His hair has always been kinda long, since he was in high school, and the second day they were here he got it cut way down to a neat trim that’s a lot like his brother’s. Once it’s back to its original length, the way his boyfriend likes, he’ll probably be over it, done grieving the end of the postseason.

“I miss your curls.”

“I still have curls!”

“Not in the same capacity.”

That is actually true. It’s mostly just on the top of his head, slight curliness that makes his hair look like it’s messy in a way that’s on purpose even though the opposite is true.

Harry expects Joey to stand just inside the edge of the water and scrunch the sand in his toes, but he doesn’t. Instead he hassles Dale a little bit and this ends up with Dale holding him by the wrists and spinning around in circles so that his feet drag across the water. Joey screams with laughter.

Meanwhile, Harry sits on his towel in the sand and watches them. He thinks of the future. Joey, in eleven or twelve years, will be drafted by the NHL. Dale’s number will be retired by the Kraken. Maybe, before that happens, they _will_ take a Stanley Cup together. This future of his, while he watches Dale spin his nephew through the seawater, also imagines wedding rings and kids of their own someday, working out how to take care of those kids while both of them are away for games… Harry has been with Dale for almost six months now. And so much has happened since February when Albert shoved him into Dale’s hotel room in Pittsburgh.

It comes to him that yes, his various relationships before, of course he loved them. If he didn’t, they never lasted long and he doesn’t count those, he’s never been the kinda guy who’ll string someone along. But the times he’s managed to fall in love with somebody, it wasn’t like this. He’s never loved anybody the way he loves Dale. In the aftermath of the postseason, sitting on a beach in Florida, Harry realizes that this is it for him. This goofball who eats whipped cream out of the can and watches cartoons and writes long, ridiculous emails to Diane.

Harry loves all those things. Even the things about Dale that he hates, which is a very short list anyway, he still loves. And he likes who he is himself when he’s with Dale. They haven’t been together long enough for him to _seriously_ consider this, though, so he’ll keep it in the back of his head. Maybe the end of next season, before the horror of the playoffs happen again, they’ll be at a point where Harry can ask Dale to marry him.

It won’t be today, it won’t be tomorrow… but he will.

Harry gets up and wades out to where they are and darts in to tap Dale’s shoulder, stopping him. “Here, gimme his ankles.” They start hammock-swinging his nephew. “Alright, ready? One… two… THREE!” And throw him way out into the water.

Joey pops up a few seconds later, sputtering and laughing. “Again!” he yells, swimming back to them.

“Is this safe?” Dale questions.

“Oh, yeah, me and Frank do this with him sometimes, it’s totally fine,” Harry grins.

They have to do this at least two dozen more times and finally stop because their injuries are getting too sore from moving so much. After that they sit on the beach holding hands while Joey scrunches the sand with his feet.

“I wish your hair would grow back.”

Harry rolls his eyes. “Is that the only thing you love me for, Coop?”

“No, of course not! But I enjoy it when it’s long and fluffy, it’s pleasant to touch.”

“Ah, so I’m just a giant sensory toy for you. Good to know my place in the world.”

“Harry-”

“I’m teasing you,” he chuckles.

“Oh, I see.”

Harry leans over and kisses his jaw right under his ear. “Y’know… I was thinking earlier, maybe someday we’ll have kids…”

“Oh, yes,” Dale agrees, nodding. “But they’ll have to be close in age. My brother is significantly older than I am and it was a detriment to us developing any kind of bond when we were young.”

“Frank’s only a year older than me, look how we are,” he scoffs.

“Yes, but you have a good sibling relationship.”

“Well, anyway, I was wondering how it’d work when we have away games and really long road trips.”

Dale frowns and seems to think for awhile. “Hmm. Perhaps we should wait until you retire, then it wouldn’t be an issue.”

“But I’ll be like forty five years old.”

“I don’t think they would mind. And it would be perfectly understandable.”

Harry starts to smile. “Yeah, they could sit on the couch and watch the away games with me. You’ll probably be captain by then.”

“I will?”

“Yeah, definitely. It’s sure as hell not gonna be Ed, he’ll retire around the same time and Hawk will be a couple years after. It’ll probably be you.”

“I see.” Dale pauses. “If possible, I will make an effort to talk them into retiring your number, too. It isn’t necessarily to do with overall skill-set, Harry. You’re so loved by the team and the positive locker room culture we have is almost entirely thanks to you.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

He’s not holding his breath, but it’s a nice thought, their numbers hanging together until the end of time. Maybe if he’s really lucky and the hockey gods decide to be kind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the second-longest fic I've ever put on AO3... the longest one is an almost 109,000 word monstrosity, so I don't think I'm ever going to top that one :D

**Author's Note:**

> Updates are on Mondays and Fridays between midnight UTC+0 and UTC -5.
> 
> If you actually are a fan of an NHL team and are reading this, chances are your team's name will come up and Harry won't like them. This is the nature of sports. I am not hating on you or even really your team specifically (unless you're a fan of the St Louis Blues, in which case your team and _especially_ your sexist asshole goalie can fuck off and die). In fact, I am having Harry hate on MY OWN TEAM way more than he is on yours, I guarantee it.
> 
> All my Twin Peaks fics can be found [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works?utf8=%E2%9C%93&commit=Sort+and+Filter&work_search%5Bsort_column%5D=revised_at&include_work_search%5Brelationship_ids%5D%5B%5D=127943&work_search%5Bother_tag_names%5D=&work_search%5Bexcluded_tag_names%5D=&work_search%5Bcrossover%5D=&work_search%5Bcomplete%5D=&work_search%5Bwords_from%5D=&work_search%5Bwords_to%5D=&work_search%5Bdate_from%5D=&work_search%5Bdate_to%5D=&work_search%5Bquery%5D=&work_search%5Blanguage_id%5D=&user_id=Aaron_The_8th_Demon).
> 
> Comments are welcomed, encouraged, and greatly appreciated :)


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